Perhaps, it’s not all that surprising that the best thing about Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill, actor Raghav Juyal, started out as a trained dancer. It makes sense how he would be so deft in his footwork and handiwork (using a knife), considering all the action choreography he’s expected to perform. Playing a character called Fani, the disappointing heir to a revered bandit Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi), Juyal gets the most defined character arc in a film that boxes people in the roles of aggressors, frightened on-lookers and corpses. Juyal plays someone who can pull off slick one-liners and slit throats in the same breath. He also gives the film its only moral reckoning – when he naively asks the ‘hero’ if he’s a rakshak (saviour) or a raakshas (demon).
The hero here, Amrit (Lakshya), like in any similarly grisly action film, is a man deeply hurt. An NSG commando by vocation, he gatecrashes his girlfriend Tulika’s (Tanya Maniktala) engagement in Ranchi. Surprising her on a train the next, when Tulika and her family are en route to Delhi, Amrit proposes to her in a railway toilet. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t roll my eyes at the film’s sheer commitment to such cheesiness. But it’s fine, because it’s swiftly providing us with all the emotional stakes for the single-minded carnage about to follow soon.
Beni, Fani and forty bandits (mostly relatives) board the train, and start looting. Little do they know that Tulika’s father, Baldeo Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya) alone would get them as much bounty as the rest of the train. Also, the bandits have no clue that they’re in the company of two bone-crunching soldiers, Amrit and his friend, Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan), who are personally vested in the well-being of the Thakur family. In the first move, an axe splits a head wide open, faces are smashed with fire extinguishers, knives are used to slash faces, arms and stab people several times. There’s blood gushing on the floor, disfigured faces, even corpses hanging like curtains – a scene that delivers on its visual shock value, but in retrospect feels too ‘designed’ for a film that almost appears to be taking place in real time.
Kill reminded me of one of my favourite filmmakers of all time – the late Tony Scott. While Scott never quite leaned into the violence this much, preferring to make snazzy, visually hectic films, his films were minimally plotted and laid efficient frameworks before launching into the depths of the genre film it’s meant to be. I’ll never forget how he introduces the tense power dynamic between Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington — two differing ideologies, about to commandeer a submarine in the first scene of Crimson Tide (1995); or Chris Pine’s failing marriage in his last film, Unstoppable (2010) using just a handful of scenes in the first five minutes of the film.
Kill aspires to have a similar leanness by making us invest in Amrit and Tulika’s love story, and thereby explaining the unravelling of Amrit halfway, when he transforms into a killing machine. Unfortunately, Maniktala never quite blends into the film during her brief screen time. Lakshya, a gifted action star and with the looks to stand out in any crowd, is suitably agile and streamlined.
Director Bhat isn’t obligated to think about the larger picture while making an efficient action film, but I wonder if he shuddered at images from his own film, in a time when baying for someone’s blood is fashionable and, in some cases, even patriotic. Thankfully, in Bhat’s film, Amrit never invokes the country or the tricolour, thereby underwriting his dastardly violence as some sort of ‘duty’ to the nation. However, there is the Sikh war cry Jaako Raakhe Saaiyan Maar Sake Na Koye that plays in the background each time Amrit goes to war. I did wonder what the audience that was evidently hypnotised by Ranbir Kapoor’s Animal (which also invoked this war cry before a pre-interval action scene to endorse the violence as a ‘holy war’), would take away from this. I don’t begrudge Kill for not being the most politically astute film, given that Bhat made the vile, anti-reservation film – Hurdang (2022) – only a year before this.
Kill is a relentless, remorseless action film. Action choreographer Se-yeong Oh, who also designed the set-pieces on Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), also set on a moving train, is phenomenal in the way he makes use of the cramped space of an Indian railway coach. The choreography by Oh and Parvez Shaikh is neat and precise, enough to make audience members audibly gasp during the film. The sound design (by Subash Sahoo, Boloy Kumar Doloi and Amandeep Singh) is exquisite and almost worryingly visceral.
I wish Bhat’s film held a wider lens, and introspected about the violence a bit more. But then Juyal’s character delivers another zinger to his on-screen father, after being schooled about how the son always goes against the father’s principles. “You’re not Amitabh Bachchan from Mohabbatein, papa. We’re dacoits – we can’t talk about principles.” I can imagine Bhat nodding from a distance when asked about a filmmaker’s accountability for the violence in their film.
