Kill Bill: Volume 1 follows The Bride, a former assassin, as she wakes from a coma and begins killing the former colleagues who tried to murder her at her wedding. Quentin Tarantino's 2003 film ends with her defeating two of her five targets and discovering the whereabouts of the man who ordered the attack, Bill, setting up the story completed in Volume 2. The film opens with The Bride, played by Uma Thurman and later named Beatrix Kiddo, bleeding on a chapel floor as Bill shoots her in the head. She survives, spends four years in a coma, and wakes up determined to kill everyone involved in the massacre, working through a list she calls the Death List Five.
Table of Contents
- Who Is The Bride and What Happened to Her?
- Who Are the Members of the Death List Five?
- What Happens in the O-Ren Ishii Showdown?
- How Does Volume 1 End, and What Does It Set Up?
- What Does the Ending Mean for the Story?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Who Is The Bride and What Happened to Her?
Beatrix Kiddo was a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, an elite hit squad led by Bill. When she becomes pregnant and tries to leave that life behind, she settles in El Paso, Texas, for a quiet wedding rehearsal. Bill and the rest of the squad track her down and massacre everyone at the chapel, shooting Beatrix in the head and leaving her for dead.
She wakes four years later in a hospital, her baby gone and her body nearly atrophied from the coma. A hospital orderly named Buck has been selling access to her unconscious body to other men; Beatrix kills him and steals his truck, which carries a case of samurai swords. From that point, she moves through her Death List Five in a sequence the film does not present chronologically.
Who Are the Members of the Death List Five?
The list names five former colleagues, each with a number corresponding to the order Beatrix intends to kill them, though the film doesn't follow that order on screen. Volume 1 covers only the first two names.
Beatrix kills Vernita Green in her own kitchen, interrupted briefly by Vernita's young daughter coming home from school, a moment the film uses to show the cost of this life rather than glorify the kill. The remaining three deaths, along with the reveal of what happened to Beatrix's child, play out in Volume 2.
- Vernita Green (code name Copperhead), now a suburban mother in Pasadena, California
- O-Ren Ishii (code name Cottonmouth), now the head of the Tokyo yakuza
- Budd (code name Sidewinder), Bill's brother, working as a bouncer in Texas
- Elle Driver (code name California Mountain Snake), another assassin with a long-standing rivalry with Beatrix
- Bill (code name Snake Charmer), the squad's leader and Beatrix's former lover
What Happens in the O-Ren Ishii Showdown?
The film's centerpiece is Beatrix's confrontation with O-Ren Ishii at the House of Blue Leaves, a Tokyo restaurant and nightclub. Before the fight, an animated sequence tells O-Ren's backstory: her parents were murdered by a yakuza boss when she was a child, and she later killed him in revenge before rising to lead the Tokyo underworld herself.
Beatrix arrives at the House of Blue Leaves and fights through O-Ren's bodyguard squad, the Crazy 88, in an extended sequence shot partly in black-and-white to soften the violence for an R rating. She also defeats Go-go Yubari, O-Ren's teenage bodyguard who fights with a mace and chain. The sequence ends with Beatrix and O-Ren dueling in a snow-covered garden, where Beatrix delivers a fatal blow and tells O-Ren it was not personal, only a matter of mathematics between them.
How Does Volume 1 End, and What Does It Set Up?
After killing O-Ren, Beatrix spares O-Ren's remaining lieutenant, Sofie Fatale, on the condition that Sofie tells Bill she is coming for him, making sure Bill understands why. The film's final scene shifts to Bill's home, where Bill learns from Sofie that Beatrix survived and has already killed two of their former colleagues.
In that same scene, Bill reveals to a colleague that Beatrix's daughter, B.B., is alive and was never told her mother was dead. This reveal recontextualizes the chapel massacre: Bill didn't just attack a former partner, he took her child and let her believe otherwise. The ending leaves three names on the list unresolved, Beatrix's reunion with her daughter unaddressed, and Bill himself unconfronted, all of which Volume 2 picks up directly.
What Does the Ending Mean for the Story?
Volume 1 ends on an incomplete revenge arc by design. Tarantino conceived Kill Bill as one film split into two volumes for length and pacing, so Volume 1 functions as the first half of a single story rather than a self-contained conclusion. The structure explains why the ending raises a stake, Beatrix's daughter is alive, rather than resolving one.
The violence in Volume 1 also builds a moral ledger Volume 2 settles. Beatrix kills Vernita in front of her child and shows O-Ren a flash of respect before killing her, establishing that revenge in this story carries a personal cost rather than functioning as simple catharsis. Volume 2 follows up by giving Budd, Elle, and Bill each a different kind of reckoning, and by returning to the question the final scene opens: what Beatrix does once she learns her daughter is alive.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Beatrix kill Bill in Volume 1?
No. Volume 1 covers only the first two names on her list, Vernita Green and O-Ren Ishii; Bill is killed in Volume 2.
Why is part of the House of Blue Leaves fight in black-and-white?
Tarantino switched that segment of the fight to black-and-white to tone down the on-screen gore enough to secure an R rating.
What does Bill learn at the very end of Volume 1?
Sofie Fatale tells him Beatrix survived and has already killed Vernita and O-Ren, and he reveals to a colleague that Beatrix's daughter is alive.