Warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of violence.
Near the halfway point of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the Joker pursues the ‘Batman’ in a truck, which says laughter is the best medicine. A close look finds an S spray painted before ‘laughter’: Slaughter is the best medicine. Take that slogan, make it into a movie, and you get writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill, starring Lakshya, Raghav Juyal, and Tanya Maniktala. A movie that studies violence as it shows a man’s journey from ‘rakshak (protector)’ to ‘rakshas (monster)’.
Amrit, played by Lakshya, is a commando who learns that his girlfriend, Tulika, played by Tanya Maniktala, has been engaged against her will. He boards the train she is on with his friend, in the hope of either convincing her family or eloping. But this plan is derailed when a gang of dacoits, led by Fani, played by Raghav Juyal, hijacks the train. It’s a straightforward premise for an action movie, but it delves deeper.
What causes people to act and react violently? Is the status quo inherently violent in ways we do not realise? Is there really any moral difference between the soldier (the system) and the dacoit (the outlaw)? After all, doesn’t the state enjoy a monopoly over violence?
On the technical front, Kill knocks it out of the park from the get-go. Arguably, the most notable is the train itself, custom-built to look like an authentic Indian train and facilitate filming. The characters are introduced, their motivations are outlined, and the stakes are set. Danger looms large with little room to move (and scant space to escape) and the two sides, who are more alike than they realise.
Trains, social cohesion, and collision
There is a tradition of movies set on trains. Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer is disguised as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie but grapples with a commentary on class and environmentalism. Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan masquerades as a zombie thriller but explores family and community, urban life in a neoliberal world, and survival and loss.
Kill follows this train of thought and shifts it to the Indian context.
Trains and the railways have long been viewed as a unifying force cutting across lines of language, religion, and caste. As the Northern Railway notes, “it is a cultural phenomenon that has profoundly shaped Indian society.” The train becomes a leveller of differences, foregoing the intersectional layers that constitute people’s identities and paring them all to one — a passenger.
This sentiment is voiced when Ashish Vidyarthi’s character sees off Tulika’s father, a powerful businessman with guns, men, and the power of the state at his disposal outside the train. But on the train, he is an ‘ordinary passenger’.
From Mahatma Gandhi being thrown out of a train because he was sitting in a ‘whites-only’ compartment in South Africa to his travels across India in order to understand the country and its people, trains had a crucial role in the Indian freedom movement. Who can forget the Kakori train robbery of 1925 by Indian revolutionaries such as Chandra Shekhar Azad, Ram Prasad Bismil, and Ashfaqullah Khan?
Trains have also been co-opted as symbols of cohesion in films and our collective consciousness.
Remember the 1968 song, Rail Gaadi Chhuk Chhuk Chuuk, which was a fly-on-the-wall documentation of Indian society and economy? Or Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades, where the protagonist, played by Shah Rukh Khan, has a revelation of the realities of India when a young boy sells him tea at a railway station, and even to a romance like Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, where the leads hailing from different economic backgrounds meet each other on a train. Or in movies about transnational solidarity, such as Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan.
Moreover, trains have also been the site where characters had their differences highlighted or were jolted into acts of violence. Think Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, where the India-Pakistan love story is introduced to the conflict, or AR Murugadoss’ Ghajini, where violence enters the life of the protagonist in the form of a human trafficking ring on a train.
Trains have been the sites of social cohesion, a serpentine microcosm of India. It is therefore only fitting that Kill finds both its jolt of romance and stream of action onboard a train honouring the show-don’t-tell adage.
A deconstruction of violence
The film respects the audience’s intelligence with the subtext of the myriad systemic issues that plague Indian society and also satisfies the urge for catharsis.
And this is reflected in the movie’s fight sequences. Amrit – a commando – relies on strategy and skill. On the other hand, the 40 dacoits are untrained in combat and rely on brute force and savagery.
The action is skillfully choreographed with the sound designed for maximum brutality, as if to press upon the audience the inevitability of violence. No matter how hard you try, your senses cannot escape its embrace. Even if you don’t see a man get stabbed in the eye, you still hear another’s brain turn to black pudding after being battered by a fire extinguisher, as if you were in the compartment yourself. The pace is like a train designed without brakes, zooming past stations of mainstream film success and shattering barriers of genre like an unrelenting juggernaut.
The narrative device of entrapping the characters and letting their conflict brew in a confined space coerces them to take the bull by its horns, effectively creating tension, an atmosphere of looming dread, and little hope of help. This works wonders in action films where the characters are limited in space and resources, such as Die Hard. Some others that come to mind are the bathroom brawl in Mission Impossible: Fallout, the iconic corridor fight in Oldboy, and the elevator fight in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Other times, the confined setting is also a metaphor for the character battling their inner demons, and breaking free is symbolic of their personal odyssey. Think Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped and Sajimon Prabhakar’s Malayankunju.
Kill does all this and then some more.
The action is not a spectacle but an exploration of one’s shadow self, forcing the characters and the audience down a claustrophobic one-way train ride into their own psyches to evaluate their relationship with violence.
Every death is gory, gruesome, and grotesque. Producer Guneet Monga said that there were “42 unique killings” in the movie. At the same time, every performance is the sign of a measured and mature actor who surrenders to the character. Especially commendable is Raghav Juyal, who brings an effortless, ruthlessness man laced with one-liners and pop culture references that simultaneously alienate him from and humanise him for the audience.
In passing, Fani mentions ache din – a fiction that was sold to his generation for the price of their youth. His familial relationship with Ashish Vidyarthi’s character and the rest of the dacoit gang surfaces a layer of humanity that can only stem from empathy. It’s this humanity that Amrit loses over the course of the film. As Fani says at one point in the film: ‘aise kaun maarta hai, bey (who on earth kills like this)?’.
Despite being marketed as India’s most violent film, Kill is far from being a celebration of violence. It speaks the verbal and visual language of the hyper-masculine to offer a movie that doesn’t partake in mindless celebration.
Often, films use action and violence to serve the audience’s primal instinct for spectacle. And then there is Kill, which dwells on the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to violence, right from a fractured sense of self to repressed urges, the aspiration of social mobility, and a crisis of masculinity.
In under two hours, Kill provokes and captivates. It offers cathartic spectacle while being a study of uncomfortable truths making up human lives. Balancing emotional weight with deft editing, pacing, acting, choreography, set, and sound design, Kill packs much more than a punch. It is designed to stab the audience with relentless observations while providing the thrills and tropes that one would expect from an action flick.
Kill uses its deceptively simple premise to force introspection while delivering a spectacle. It’s only interested in asking questions, not finding answers. It slaughters one with its effectiveness. And, as we know, slaughter is the best medicine. Or is it?
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