Kill

Snapshot

Kill is a Hindi-language action thriller that takes place almost entirely inside the coaches of a New Delhi–bound Rajdhani Express. Amrit Rathod (Lakshya), an NSG commando, boards the train with his fellow commando Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) to intercept the arranged engagement of Tulika (Tanya Maniktala); midway through the journey a clan of some forty dacoits, led by the volatile Fani (Raghav Juyal) and his patriarch Beni Prasad (Ashish Vidyarthi), takes the train. What begins as a robbery becomes an extermination conducted at arm's length in corridors barely wide enough for two bodies.

The film's defining formal gesture is structural: the title card KILL does not appear at the head of the picture but roughly at its midpoint, after the loss that converts Amrit from a soldier exercising restraint into an instrument of annihilation. Everything before is a hostage thriller; everything after is a slaughter, and the film knows the difference. Running roughly 105 minutes, it premiered in TIFF's Midnight Madness section in September 2023 and reached Indian theatres in July 2024, with Lionsgate handling a US release the same month — an unusual route for a Hindi genre film, and part of why Kill registered internationally as an event rather than an import.

Industry & production

The production's most telling fact is its financing. Kill was produced by Dharma Productions — Karan Johar and Apoorva Mehta — in partnership with Guneet Monga Kapoor and Achin Jain's Sikhya Entertainment. Dharma is the house most identified with the glossy, diasporic, romantic-family idiom of post-1990s Hindi cinema; Sikhya is an independent shingle whose reputation was built on festival and documentary work. That a studio synonymous with the wedding-song grammar of Bollywood bankrolled a film that dismembers a wedding party on a train is not incidental. It is a legible corporate response to the collapse of the old Hindi mainstream's box-office certainty after 2020, when Telugu and Kannada action cinema — the KGF, Pushpa, RRR cycle — demonstrated that the pan-Indian audience would turn out for velocity and violence rather than melody.

The casting reflects the same calculation. Lakshya (Lakshya Lalwani) came from television and a stalled Dharma launch; Kill functions as a debut-by-other-means, and its physical demands are the whole of the performance. Raghav Juyal was known to Indian audiences chiefly as a dancer and comic reality-television presence, which makes his casting as Fani a deliberate act of misdirection. Ashish Vidyarthi, a National Award winner and veteran of decades of character work, supplies the ballast of an older Hindi-cinema villainy against which the younger men's chaos registers.

The international pathway matters as much as the domestic one. A Midnight Madness premiere is a specific kind of credential — it certifies a film to the genre-festival circuit and to the boutique action market that The Raid opened a decade earlier. Lionsgate's acquisition converted that credential into a theatrical release in North America and, by widely reported accounts, into development of an English-language remake. Indian films have been remade in Hollywood before, but rarely on the strength of their action design.

Domestically, Kill was a modest theatrical performer relative to its critical standing — the audience for a certified-adult, songless bloodbath is narrower than the audience for the genre's louder star vehicles — and its afterlife has been substantially a streaming and word-of-mouth one. Specific figures vary across trade sources and are not reproduced here.

Technology

Kill is a film built on a constraint that had to be manufactured before it could be exploited. A real coach is roughly three metres wide, with fixed berths and no room for a camera operator, let alone a stunt team. The production's solution was the standard one, executed unusually rigorously: full-scale train interiors constructed on stages with removable wall and ceiling sections, so that a corridor could be shot as a corridor while the crew stood in the space where a wall would be. The film's realism therefore depends on an illusion of enclosure that is being continuously dismantled just outside the frame — the compartments look immovable precisely because they were designed to come apart.

Capture is digital, handheld for the majority of the combat, and reliant on compact rigs that can pass through a doorway at a run. The lighting scheme is almost entirely motivated by fixtures native to Indian long-distance rail: the tube lights and amber night-lamps of a sleeper coach, the blue wash of passing platforms through windows, the reading lights over berths. That palette does two kinds of work — it authenticates the space, and it makes blood the only saturated colour in the frame.

Gore is predominantly practical: prosthetics, blood rigs, and physical damage to the set, with digital work reserved for cleanup, wire removal, and the exterior passages between coaches. The choice is consistent with the film's larger argument that violence has weight and consequence; CG blood floats, and Kill needs its blood to pool, congeal, and make the floor slippery, which it does, repeatedly and to choreographic purpose.

Fine-grained technical documentation — camera bodies, lens sets, the exact division between stage and location work — is thinner in the public record than for comparable Western productions, and I have not asserted specifics beyond what is reliably established.

Technique

Cinematography

Rafey Mahmood's photography accepts the corridor as the film's governing shape. The dominant figure is the longitudinal shot down a coach — a tunnel of berths receding to a vanishing point — which converts the train into a queue of bodies waiting their turn. Because the space permits movement on only one axis, the camera's choices are reduced to a stark grammar: follow, precede, or hold. Mahmood uses all three, but the following shot predominates, keeping Amrit's back in frame so that what he is about to do arrives at the same instant for viewer and victim.

Wide focal lengths are used at close range, which in a confined set produces the mild distortion of a face pressed too near the lens — an aggression built into the optics rather than the staging. Camera height is frequently low, at berth level, so that upper bunks loom and passengers become an audience in a gallery. Night exteriors through the windows supply a continuous horizontal drift, a reminder that the container is moving even when the action inside has stalled.

Editing

Shivkumar V. Panicker's cutting is the film's most disciplined element and its clearest departure from the shaky-cam orthodoxy that dominated action editing in the 2000s. Kill keeps its geography intact. At any moment the viewer knows which coach, which end, which side, and how many bodies lie between the hero and the next door. Fights are assembled from relatively sustained pieces, with cuts placed on impact or on a reframe rather than used to conceal a stunt performer's face or a missed blow.

The cut rate escalates across the film in a curve that mirrors Amrit's degradation: measured in the first half, when he is trying to contain the situation, and progressively more percussive after the title drops. That mid-film title card is itself an editorial gesture — a hard punctuation mark that reclassifies everything on either side of it.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The action design, credited to Se-yeong Oh and Parvez Shaikh, is the film's real authorship. The pairing of a Korean stunt coordinator with an Indian action director is itself a document of how the 2020s Indian action film was made: technique imported from East Asian and Southeast Asian practice, applied to Indian bodies, spaces, and melodramatic logic.

The staging treats the coach as a set of fixed problems. Berths become ceilings to brace against and platforms to fall from. Luggage chains, curtains, fire extinguishers, hammers, and the fixtures of a train lavatory become weapons because nothing else is available; the improvisation is enforced by the architecture rather than performed for wit. Vestibules between coaches serve as gates — thresholds where a single defender can hold a line — which gives the film a progression legible as a series of chambers.

Costume carries the film's clearest visual argument. Amrit's light-coloured shirt functions as a recording surface, accumulating the evidence of what he has done until he is unrecognisable as the man who boarded. It is an old device and Kill uses it without embarrassment.

Sound

The mix is dominated by the train itself: bogie rhythm, rail joints, the metallic shudder of a coach at speed. That bed operates as a tempo track, a constant pulse against which screams, impacts, and silences are measured. Blade and blunt-force foley is deliberately wet and close, closer than a room this size would produce, which is the film's way of insisting that each wound is a specific event rather than a countable unit.

Crucially, Kill declines the conventional Hindi-film musical apparatus during its action. There is no playback number staged over combat, no melodic release. Where score enters it is textural and low, functioning as pressure rather than commentary.

I would flag the music credits as the one attribution I hold loosely: circulating listings assign the background score to Haphazard, and I note that rather than assert it.

Performance

Lakshya's Amrit is a performance built almost entirely from physical carriage and a narrowing face. The character's arc is not psychological in any dialogic sense — he says relatively little after the midpoint — so the work is in fatigue, in the shift from trained economy to ugly expenditure, and in the visible cost of each subsequent kill.

Raghav Juyal's Fani is the film's most discussed turn, and the discussion is warranted. A trained dancer's control over the body's centre of gravity produces a villain who slinks, crumples, and pivots rather than stalks; the character weeps, screeches, and preens, and Juyal's willingness to make him undignified is what keeps him frightening. He is not a professional; he is a grieving son with a knife, which is worse.

Vidyarthi anchors the clan in an older register of Hindi screen villainy — patriarchal, aggrieved, transactional. Maniktala's Tulika is given limited screen time and functions largely as the engine of Amrit's transformation, a structural choice the film has been fairly criticised for.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Kill observes near-unities of place and time: one train, one night, one journey. That classical compression is filled with the least classical possible content. The dramatic mode is a fusion of two traditions that ordinarily do not touch — Hindi melodrama, with its arranged marriages, thwarted lovers, and fathers who trade daughters, and the siege-action grindhouse, with its escalating attrition and its arithmetic of remaining enemies.

The mid-film title drop is the hinge on which the two modes exchange places. Before it, the film is legible as a romance under threat; after it, the romance is revealed to have been the fuel. The structure is a revenge narrative, but an unusually honest one about what revenge costs the avenger's legibility as a hero. Fani and Amrit are constructed as mirrors — two sons acting on behalf of the dead, each certain of his grievance — and the film's willingness to let the audience notice the symmetry is what separates it from a straightforward power fantasy. By the final coach, the question of who is the villain of this story has become a live one, and the film puts it on the table rather than resolving it.

Genre & cycle

The film belongs to the confined-space, one-against-many action lineage whose modern canon runs from Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003) corridor fight through Gareth Evans's The Raid (2011) and The Raid 2 (2014), Pete Travis's Dredd (2012), and the John Wick films from 2014. Its specific setting places it in an equally legible train cycle: Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013), which read the train as a class diagram; Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan (2016), which used the coach as a sequence of survivable chambers; and, further back, the American train thrillers from Under Siege 2 onward.

Within Indian cinema, the train is a saturated object. It carries the wonder of Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), the spectacle of the Sholay (1975) opening, the disaster spectacle of The Burning Train (1980), and — most pointedly — the romantic transit of the 1990s Hindi mainstream, in which trains are where lovers meet and where families are eventually reconciled. Kill is constructed against that last association with some deliberateness, and the fact that it comes from Dharma sharpens the joke.

It also arrives inside a distinct domestic cycle: the hyperviolent Indian genre film of 2023–24, alongside Animal (2023) and the Malayalam Marco (2024), and adjacent to Dev Patel's diasporic Monkey Man (2024). Where several of those films use violence in the service of a restored patriarchal order, Kill is more equivocal about what its violence produces.

Authorship & method

Nikhil Nagesh Bhat wrote and directed. His prior features — the black comedy Brij Mohan Amar Rahe (2018) and Hurdang (2022) — gave little indication of this register, which makes Kill a genuine reinvention rather than an escalation. Bhat has said in interviews that the premise originated in a train robbery he lived through as a young man, and the film's texture supports the claim: the early robbery sequences, with their practised division of labour and their calibrated intimidation of compliant passengers, feel observed rather than invented.

His key collaborators: Rafey Mahmood on cinematography; Shivkumar V. Panicker cutting; the action design shared between Se-yeong Oh and Parvez Shaikh, whose contribution is closer to co-authorship than to second-unit service. Bhat's method, as far as it can be reconstructed, was to design the film around the action rather than the reverse — to establish the choreographic problem (a corridor, forty men, one soldier) and let narrative structure follow from it.

The producers exert a visible influence too. Guneet Monga Kapoor's festival-facing sensibility explains the Midnight Madness route; Dharma's involvement explains the film's confidence that a melodramatic core will hold a genre exercise together.

Movement / national cinema

Kill is best understood as an artifact of Hindi cinema's post-2020 identity crisis. The Bombay mainstream lost its assumed centrality to South Indian production during the pandemic years and to streaming before that. One response was imitation of the pan-Indian mass film; another, visible here, was the pursuit of a genre identity legible to international distributors without translation.

The film's technical debts run east rather than west: Korean and Indonesian action practice, imported through personnel rather than pastiche. That is a meaningful shift in how Indian action is made — historically a domain of indigenous fight-master traditions with their own conventions of impact and rhythm — and Kill is among the clearest demonstrations of what the hybrid produces.

Era / period

The film sits precisely in the mid-2020s configuration: post-pandemic theatrical uncertainty, a festival-to-genre-distribution pipeline that can launch a non-English action film internationally, and a global audience trained by a decade of John Wick and The Raid to read fight choreography as authorship. Its certification as an adult film in India, and its R equivalent abroad, situate it in the same moment as a broader Indian argument about screen violence that Animal had made unavoidable months earlier.

Themes

Escalation as contagion. The film's central proposition is that violence is not a resource one draws on but a threshold one crosses. Amrit's early restraint is professional; once it breaks, nothing in his training governs him.

Class geometry. A train is a vertical society laid horizontally. The dacoits are a rural underclass boarding an air-conditioned coach full of people whose comfort is the point of the robbery. The film does not sentimentalise them, but it does not pretend the asymmetry is invisible either.

Family as gang. Both antagonists and protagonist act for kin. Beni's clan is a family business; Fani's rampage is filial grief; Amrit's is romantic and fraternal. The film systematically refuses to distinguish the motives by quality.

The wedding-train inverted. The arranged marriage, the disapproving father, the lover in pursuit — the film assembles the full apparatus of Hindi romance and then destroys it, with the destruction beginning at exactly the moment the romance would conventionally triumph.

Masculinity and the state. Amrit is a commando: the sanctioned instrument of national violence. Removed from command, jurisdiction, and purpose, that instrument does not stop working. It simply stops being sanctioned.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception was strong and unusually consistent across the festival press, the Indian trades, and Anglophone genre criticism, with near-universal comparison to The Raid as shorthand for the film's confinement and intensity. Praise concentrated on the action design, on Juyal's performance, and on the mid-film title drop as a structural stroke. The most persistent reservations were two: that the escalation of gore in the final act exceeds what the drama can absorb, and that Tulika exists to be lost — a fridging that the film's own thematic seriousness makes harder to excuse. Both criticisms are fair, and the second is the one most likely to shape the film's long-term standing.

Its backward influences are legible and largely acknowledged: the Korean revenge cinema of the 2000s for its moral vertigo, the Evans films for its choreographic ethic and its refusal to cut away, Snowpiercer and Train to Busan for the train-as-sequence-of-chambers, and the Hindi melodramatic tradition — including the Bachchan-era avenger — for the emotional substrate that makes the carnage legible as grief rather than sport.

Forward influence is genuinely too recent to assess, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. The available signals are these: a reported English-language remake set up through Lionsgate; a marked increase in the seriousness with which Hindi productions treat action design as a discipline requiring specialist, often imported, expertise; and the demonstration that a Hindi genre film without stars, songs, or spectacle budgets can travel on craft alone. Whether Kill becomes a template or remains a singular achievement depends on whether the industry that funded it concludes the lesson was the violence or the rigour.