If you’ve ever read a self-help quote like “Become the best version of yourself” and thought, “Okay, but what if that version is a knife-wielding psychopath?”, A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life is here to lovingly, politely stab that entire industry in the neck.
Staten Cousins Roe’s 2019 satirical horror road movie is basically Eat Pray Love if Liz decided to ditch yoga and just start culling life coaches. It’s dark, dry, and very British—the sort of film that smiles warmly at you while something awful happens just offscreen. And somehow, against all odds, it’s kind of… uplifting?
You know, in a “self-actualize-through-murder” sort of way.
Lou Farnt: Patron Saint of the Terminally Timid
Lou Farnt (Katie Brayben) is the kind of person self-help books are written about, not for. She lives with her venomous, manipulative mother in a particularly beige corner of England. Her days are spent being belittled, ignored, and told she’s not good enough—which, in fairness, is exactly the sort of background you’d expect for someone who ends up on a murder-tour with a stranger.
Lou clings to cassette tapes and talks by self-help guru Chuck Knoah, whose vague motivational platitudes are exactly the sort of thing you’d find on Instagram under a sunset. She’s desperate to change, but she doesn’t know how. She’s not broken enough for a full nervous breakdown, but not stable enough to stay like this forever.
Enter Val.
Val (Poppy Roe) isn’t just a self-help practitioner. She’s self-help’s final boss.
Val Stone: Your New Favorite Life Coach From Hell
Lou first glimpses Val at another guru’s event—a sharp-featured woman in the crowd who seems too composed, too still. Then she’s gone. When they finally meet properly, Val introduces herself as a life coach who sees something special in Lou. And like every great cult leader, abuser, or TED Talk speaker, she offers exactly what Lou wants most: attention, approval, and a narrative where Lou is secretly extraordinary.
Val invites Lou to join her on a road trip to “research” other self-help gurus. Lou hesitates—she’s never even left home for that long—but one more round of emotional abuse from Mother Dearest literally pushes her out the door.
And so, with a duffel bag full of low self-esteem and some voicemails queued up for Mum, Lou climbs into Val’s car. It’s a buddy road trip, just like in the wholesome movies, only here the buddy dynamic is:
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One woman is a repressed doormat with a murdery id waiting to hatch
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The other is a calm, smiling serial killer who kills life coaches like she’s editing bad first drafts
Honestly, it’s one of the healthiest co-dependent relationships in horror.
Death, Discovery, and the Myth of “Better You”
Their first stop sets the tone beautifully. A wilderness retreat run by Ben (Tomiwa Edun), a painfully sincere man who makes everyone hug trees and share feelings. The activities are harmless. The people are harmless. The only dangerous thing in the woods is Val’s patience.
By morning, Lou and Val are leaving in a hurry. We linger just long enough to see the smashed-in heads of Ben and his attendees. No big speech. No monologue. Just: “We did some inner work and now everyone’s dead. Next.”
This becomes the rhythm of the film: new guru, new flavor of self-help, new murder(s). A sound-therapy couple in a lovely home? Dead. Laugh therapy enthusiasts? Dead. A birth-memory therapist? Spiritually dead already, so Val just finishes the job emotionally.
What keeps it from feeling repetitive is that the movie isn’t really about the kills. It’s about Lou slowly unfurling. At first, she’s horrified, passive, in shock. But when Val is nearly overpowered by one of the sound-therapy hosts, it’s Lou who moves in for the kill. It’s Lou who takes the knife. Lou who crosses the line.
Val doesn’t panic. She beams. “You’re my best student,” she says, as if Lou just nailed a trust fall instead of manslaughter.
This is where the satire really lands: the film treats murder the way the self-help industry treats “breakthroughs.” Did you cut toxic people out of your life, or just their lives out of them? Details.
Self-Help as Cult, Comedy, and Crime Scene
The movie absolutely skewers self-help culture, but it does it with such a light touch it never feels like a lecture. Each “guru” they visit is a different shade of nonsense:
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Ben in the woods: earnestly eco-spiritual, full of hugs and gentle male energy, like a human soy candle.
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The sound-vibration couple: smug, serene, and disturbingly confident that humming at you will heal your soul.
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Laugh therapy circle: people forcing themselves to laugh until you want to die before they do.
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Birth-memory practitioner: digging into trauma like it’s a fun day trip.
And then there’s Chuck Knoah himself: the man Lou has worshipped via tapes and teachings. When they finally reach his estate, he turns out to be a washed-up, whiny, self-pitying fraud on the edge of irrelevance. His marriage is failing, his publisher wants something new, and he’s about as inspirational as a spreadsheet.
Ironically, the moment he realizes Lou and Val are the wanted serial killers on the news, he suddenly sees the potential in them: Now there’s a book deal. Now there’s a hook. Nothing says “authentic personal growth” like co-authoring your memoir with two women who just killed half the self-help scene.
He starts lining up a meeting. Val puts a bullet in his head.
I mean, technically she just helped him “let go of what no longer serves him.”
Lou’s Awakening (And Possibly Matricide)
Throughout the trip, Lou keeps calling her mother to reassure her she’s safe, whether from a payphone or car. Those voicemails are her last tether to her old, suffocating life. But as the journey goes on, she starts to change. Not just in what she does, but in how she sees herself.
At one point, during a particularly intense session with a “birth memory” practitioner, Lou hallucinates—or remembers—killing her own mother before leaving. The film intercuts that with Val murdering Mum in the same situation.
Did Lou kill her mother, or did Val? Or is this Lou reframing her emotional freedom as a literal act of violence? The film never answers outright, and that ambiguity is one of its best tricks. It’s not interested in neat lines between reality and fantasy, guilt and empowerment. Lou’s “awakening” is messy, bloody, and deeply unreliable.
But it is an awakening. She talks more. She pushes back. She even attacks Val in a field at one point, choking her until she almost passes out. Val doesn’t fight back. She urges Lou to finish her. When Lou can’t, they both lie there, exhausted and weirdly proud of each other. Personal growth, baby.
The Cliff, the Cops, and the Loop
By the time they reach Chuck Knoah, the relationship between Lou and Val is crumbling. Val’s been subtly trying to manipulate the narrative, even tipping off the police in a bid to frame Lou and escape. It’s a betrayal wrapped in mentorship language: “This is for your own good, sweetheart, you’ll thank me later.”
But Lou’s catching up. After Val kills Chuck, Lou stabs Val. They stagger, bleed, and end up at the edge of a cliff while cops and a helicopter close in, like a low-budget Thelma & Louise designed by a true-crime podcast.
There’s an almost tender final exchange: student and teacher, killer and killer, both aware this is the end of something significant and terrible and weirdly beautiful.
Lou stabs Val again. She then stabs herself. They fall to the ground together.
But when police arrive… Val’s body is gone.
Has she escaped? Was she ever entirely real? Is she a person, a persona, or a violent avatar of Lou’s repressed rage? The movie shrugs and hands you that question to take home like a party favor.
The final shot is a perfect loop: Lou, walking outside in her earbuds, listening to Chuck Knoah’s recorded lecture, exactly as in the opening. Has nothing changed? Has everything changed? Is this the memory of who she was, or the reality of who she is now, restarting the cycle?
Either way, she’s still walking. And she’s not walking for her mother, or for Chuck, or for Val. She’s walking for herself, however catastrophically that’s gone so far.
A Dark Little Gem With a Knife Behind Its Back
A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life is small in scale—few characters, modest locations, no flashy gore—but it’s razor-sharp where it counts. It’s funny in that dry, uncomfortable way where you’re not always sure if you should be laughing… which, of course, makes you laugh harder.
Katie Brayben is heartbreakingly good as Lou: awkward, hungry for validation, slowly discovering she has teeth. Poppy Roe’s Val is charismatic and terrifying, the kind of woman you’d follow into a yoga class and then inexplicably into a murder spree.
Staten Cousins Roe’s direction is confident and understated. No loud jump scares, no hyper-stylized kills. Just a steady, calm march through escalating horror and self-discovery, like a mindfulness retreat hosted by Patrick Bateman.
It’s ultimately a surprisingly positive film in its own twisted way: Lou does learn to stand up for herself. She does leave her toxic environment. She does stop letting other people define her.
Sure, she leaves a trail of corpses behind her—but hey, you can’t spell “self-help” without “hemoglobin.”
…Okay, you can. But this movie chooses not to.
