Filmmaker John Patton Ford’s sophomore feature, How to Make a Killing — inspired by the 1949 British classic Kind Hearts and Coronets — is a sadistic dark comedy about temptation, inheritance, and the moral ruin that follows when a man deadens his conscience so completely that, faced with choice after choice, he makes the wrong one every time.

The film’s first major moral decision, however, belongs not to its protagonist but to his mother. In the film’s macabre and unexpectedly anti-abortion opening, she rejects a life of luxury and chooses instead the life of her unborn child, despite the consequence of being cut off from the vast Redfellow family fortune. Ed Harris, portraying the Redfellow patriarch with a menacing, cadaverous countenance, looms over these early scenes with a vaguely Nosferatu-like chill.

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That child grows up to become Becket Redfellow, played by the charismatic and deeply likable Glen Powell. His childhood is marked by a comically cruel string of tragedies. His father, upon witnessing Becket’s birth, promptly dies of an aneurysm (a rare case of losing your father to childbirth), leaving Becket to be raised solely by his mother, before she, too, dies young, succumbing to cancer.

Ford frames the story in a quasi-Amadeus mode. Becket recounts the tale of his life from prison, confessing his sins to a priest. Other than the conventional paths of labor and career advancement, Becket knows that his one true lottery ticket lies in the grotesquely large Redfellow inheritance,........

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