It’s been apparent to the discerning student of world cinema for a little while now that Indian movies are about to burst into the Western mainstream. (Modesty be damned, I mentioned this on my personal blog at the end of last year.) The ground-breaking Oscar for RRR was the beginning of the avalanche, enhanced by the fact that right now Kalki 2898 AD is one the top-five grossing movies in America. And the next Indian movie to explode across all our screens will be Kill, a Hindi-language slaughterfest in which many, many people die very, very badly.
It was directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, who also wrote it (with additional dialogue by Ayesha Syed). It’s set on an Indian sleeper train, and while it’s an Indian film to its core, it clearly has been made for a Western audience. One of the action directors is Se-Yeong Oh, who worked on Snowpiercer, another unpleasantly violent fight movie also set in the tight spaces of a moving train. Kill is designed for audiences used to the corpses piling up like they do in the John Wicks, and with that title you know exactly what you’re getting. It’s just such a shame that this pandering to a global audience is done with so little originality.
The story of Kill
Tropes and stereotypes can serve a purpose, in that with them you don’t need to understand much to know what’s going on, but hoo boy there’s a lot of them here. The doe-eyed Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) has been forcibly engaged by her extremely wealthy father Baldeo (Harsh Chhaya) to a man who isn’t her secret boyfriend Amrit Rathod (Lakshya, who gets an ‘introducing’ credit, and how). Amrit and his best friend Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) happen to be Indian army commandos who rush to try to stop the engagement, but the frightened Tulika shoos them away.
The men learn Tulika’s family is returning to Delhi via sleeper train, so get themselves tickets a few cars up. The trouble is the train is hijacked by an enormous family of cleaver-wielding bandits led by the fey and psychotic Fani (Raghav Juyal) under the supervision of patriarch Beni (Ashish G Vidyarthi), whose crimes include the one against fashion that has him in a brown argyle sweater-vest. The phone signal has been jammed and the guards are napping at the front of the train, so the bandits use their sheer numbers to menace everybody until they realise they have Baldeo and his family in their hands. Their ransom would provide way more money than nicking the wallets and watches of terrified passengers. But nobody menaces Amrit’s girl and gets away with it.
There are quite a few hints of a much smarter movie peeking out through Kill’s screenplay. Fani’s harping on about Tulika’s skincare regime makes it pretty clear why he’s been rejected by his family. The bandits actually have a very strong familial bond, and it’s somewhat jarring to see, at one end of a train car, bloodstained men wailing over the bodies of their viciously murdered relatives while at the other end people are using weapons not limited to sledgehammers and kukris to fight to the death.
At one point Viresh is stabbed in the same wound where he was recently shot, which he takes surprisingly well. Amrit also endures an incredible amount of violence, the kind that might hurt more the feelings of a lesser man. In the aggregate, there’s not a single body part that’s spared the blade. And all of these truly desperate fights are done with other passengers cringing in their seats, watching necks getting snapped and blood spurting in ways that will keep the local therapists busy for decades. It’s visceral, to put it lightly. If you like learning how many different ways there are of killing someone with a fire extinguisher this movie is absolutely for you.
The trouble is that the way in which Tulika is treated is so retrograde that it diminishes nearly everything else Mr. Bhat is aiming for. The main reason for that is the I’m-not-spoiling-it-but-you-sure-can-guess plot twist that provides Amrit with the excuse to go berserker. There’s an obvious switch from where he’s fighting for survival to where he’s fighting for the joy of the kill, an ugly look. Even the bandits are horrified – at multiple points these men with knives to the throats of passengers they’re using as human shields complain that they aren’t safe from Amrit – and it must be said they have a point.
Lakshya is for sure a discovery, nimble on his feet and prepared to get nasty indeed, and Mr. Juyal uses his dancer’s grace to add a bloodcurdling layer of menace to his character. And yet there’s a glee to all this carnage that is never not disturbing, even in a silly movie designed to provide late-night thrills to a young and/or drunk audience.
It’s good that movies like Kill exist to provide for a safe and cathartic outlet for our less pleasant fantasies, and it’s great that tropes done well enable movies to get worldwide distribution on talent alone. To complain that a cliched action thriller is also sexist and homophobic feels somewhat beside the point, and yet one must. That said, should that prevent your enjoyment of watching a whole bunch of nasty people die in a whole bunch of really nasty ways? Not especially. If you’re here for the gore, the rest is secondary, and if you’re not here for the gore you’ve bought the wrong ticket.
Kill is now playing in limited theaters in the United States.
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