A man is going to die in the morning, and his cheesecake is the wrong flavor. He is asleep in his cell, blanket pulled over his face, still wearing a sleep mask when the guard yanks the blanket off. A priest, Father Morris (Adrian Lukis), comes in and sits across from him, death bells of a kind tolling in How to Make a Killing.
The condemned man shifts from lying to sitting, and his eye catches the plate on the table. He gestures toward the priest: help yourself. The priest declines. He ordered vanilla, the man notes, and they brought chocolate. Then a pause. “Kill me,” he says. This is the morning’s greatest grievance, delivered without irony.
The scene carries the entire argument of John Patton Ford‘s How to Make a Killing in a single gesture. Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) wanted one thing his whole life: what he thought he deserved. Not money, not power, but to stand at the center of the family that cast him and his mother out. The wrong cheesecake is a genuine violation within this logic—small, absurd, but real. He ordered vanilla. Vanilla was his right. Someone else decided.
“Take what you deserve.” In the film, the line is a dying mother’s last words, but it is also the most well-worn ideological slogan of our age. On LinkedIn motivation posts, in self-help books, in the mouth of every career coach: you deserve this, you’re worth it, just reach out and take it. This is the promise of meritocracy: the doors are open, all you need is the right move. Ford, who wrote and directed this dark comedy, hollows out that promise. Quietly, almost politely, but he does.
You take something from the system, the system takes something from you. The exchange isn’t always visible—the bill usually arrives last, just when you think you’ve finally gotten what you wanted. Becket understands this when he gets in the car. He settles into the seat, looks out the window, watches Ruth (Jessica Henwick) walk away, and it hits him. He got what he wanted, but he never really wanted it in the first place. He only thought he did.
That’s the end. The story runs in reverse. A man on death row looking back. Inspired by Robert Hamer‘s 1949 British black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, itself drawn from Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank, How to Make a Killing follows a son who eliminates his wealthy relatives one by one to claim his inheritance. His mother was cast out of the Redfellow family for keeping her teenage pregnancy, and the same family now refuses to let him in. Midway through, the priest poses the film’s central question.
At that point, Becket has a career, a future, and Ruth, a woman who reads, talks to him, and is by any measure the right person. Then there is the Redfellow fortune, a door that never opened for him. The priest sits down across from him and asks: You already have everything. Why do you want more? No direct answer comes, but it is there from the beginning, hanging around his mother’s neck.
Cast out young and pregnant, Mary Redfellow (Nell Williams) left through the wrong door. Before she died, she told her son one thing: take the life you deserve. He carries the sentence like a jewel, along with her lock of hair, on a chain around his neck, everywhere. The real inheritance was never the estate. It was the promise, and the family never honored it.
“Take what you deserve”, however, is not a valediction. It is the elite society’s language, and it resounds in culture and politics, ringing through nepotism, cronyism, oligarchy, patronage, and kakistocracy. The system reserves the right to decide what is deserved – good and bad – and to whom.
The Guard of the Gilded Gates
[Spoilers ahead.] This is where How to Make a Killing quietly diverges. In an ordinary story of ambition, greed is the engine; the hero wants more than he has, and it destroys him. Becket’s desire is different. He isn’t trying to climb beyond his station. He is, however, trying to reclaim what was taken from his mother before he was born. The distinction seems small, but it changes everything. When you believe something is owed to you, you are no longer driven by appetite but by justice. Justice, unlike appetite, does not negotiate.
Money isn’t enough. Success isn’t enough. You need lineage, blood, the right surname carried from the right source. The Redfellows don’t see him because his mother made the wrong choice. In his 1990 social history, City of Quartz, Mike Davis mapped this architecture of the American dream: an inside and an outside, visible and invisible walls, and the walls are never merely a matter of money. Becket doesn’t try to tear the wall down. He tries to get inside. He goes in knowing all this because his mother said so, because the promise is still unmet, because refusing to recognize the claim doesn’t make the claim less real. It makes it more urgent.
Julia Steinway (Margaret Qualley), Becket Redfellow’s childhood friend and first love, never fully receded. She is wealthy, fluent in the grammar of money, and can sense which doors are about to open. She slowly drips the poison into his mind; lays the plan, and prepares the ground. She is made of the same material as he is at her core: the same appetite, the same hunger for position, and the same fluency in the language of the game. She doesn’t invent his desire. She gives it a direction.
He chooses Ruth: clean, real, the very embodiment of the life he could have, but Julia doesn’t let go. She lights the fuse, arranges the conditions, and waits. He walks toward Ruth and ends up with Julia, not because he makes the wrong choice, but because the current is already pulling him toward where he belongs. Two paths to the same summit. Only one was ever really open.
This much must also be said: Julia doesn’t see him as a tool. If she did, she wouldn’t let him in her car. For her, he was always there, was always going to sit in that seat, was always going to go to that estate. They are partners, but not equal partners. For Julia, this is a destination. For Becket, it is both destination and disappearance.
Prison is where the account is settled. Julia corners him there, holding the evidence. She could clear him. The price: the entire Redfellow fortune. He signs. He walks out with nothing left, only the Redfellow name, and whatever meaning the name was always supposed to carry.
Where does Ruth fit in this accounting? Nowhere. She was the girlfriend of Noah (Zach Woods), one of the murdered cousins, which is to say, from the beginning, someone the system didn’t count. They fell in love, lived together, and a future seemed to take shape, but that future couldn’t fit inside the arrangement. When Becket is released from prison, she is waiting, and he moves toward her joyfully. Ruth holds out a necklace. His mother’s lock of hair. The last thing that belongs to him, returned in silence. This isn’t punishment; it is recognition. Ruth sees what was chosen, or what needed to be chosen, and gives back his things. Their bond breaks, quietly.
In the background, Julia’s car is waiting; the driver opens the door. This final image is How to Make a Killing‘s coldest moment. Ruth leaves because she was always too clean for the world he is being pulled toward. Julia waits because they are made of the same material and she always knew the planets would align. He gets in the car, settling into his rightful place, beside her. He has no other road now.
That moment—looking out the car window, heading toward the estate—is when the bill arrives. Nobody forced him, nobody even pulled him. Elite society only shaped his desires. While he chased them, he felt free until he saw that what he got didn’t make him happy. All that remains is the question: Did I really want this?
Meritocracy’s Poison
Meritocracy does not announce itself as ideology. It arrives as common sense. What it doesn’t say is that to walk through those doors, you must first learn to want the right things. Becket has a career, a future, Ruth – everything the world would call success. Yet Julia planted something else, something that grew quietly alongside. At some point, his desire and her plan become indistinguishable. This is how the system operates. It doesn’t force you. It doesn’t even seduce you. It simply shapes what you want, so slowly, so completely, that by the time you’re standing at the door you worked your whole life to open, you can no longer remember wanting anything else.
None of this is an individual blind spot. Becket was told “take what you deserve”, and he did, or tried to. But the same order also decides what counts as deserved: you need blood, lineage, the right mother who left through the right door. This is how meritocracy works: it tells everyone the promise, and presents the bill, the cost to oneself, later. What destroys Becket isn’t greed. If it were greed, the story would be simpler. What destroyed him was letting himself speak elite society’s language, and losing himself inside it.
The answer to the priest’s question is here, at the end of How to Make a Killing. Blood is recognized, promises are not. He pays the price of that distinction by losing Ruth, his freedom, and every cent he saved. He paid it all to pass through that door.
He passes through. His mother’s necklace in his pocket. Somewhere the cheesecake is the wrong flavor. Some things never resolve. Maybe he never wanted resolution, after all. Maybe we never do, either.
Works Cited
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, 1990.