‘Kill’ review: The violence in this grisly action film is anything but empty

Watching Kill was a draining physical experience. Sometimes I found myself sitting weirdly, legs tangled, heart racing. Whenever the film paused for breath, I was reminded to catch mine. My nerves were shot 45 minutes in—and then it really gets stressful. All around me there were groans, gasps, murmurs of protest, the sound of an audience that couldn't deal with what was happening onscreen but couldn't look away either.

There were other sounds too. It was these, more than the violent events of the film, which made this a profoundly disturbing screening. But I’ll come to that later.

For about 20 minutes, you could mistake Kill for a Bollywood film. Tullika (Tanya Maniktala) has been pressured into an engagement by her father, the powerful Baldeo Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya). She goes through with it, but intends to marry her love, commando Amrit (Lakshya). On the train back to New Delhi, Amrit turns up to surprise her. There’s a marriage proposal, a little banter. There’s also a group of shifty-looking men who’ve boarded the train, but Amrit and Tullika are charming and in love, and it’ll probably work out.

How quickly, mercilessly, the film snuffs out this fantasy. It’s gone the second the family of dacoits start their raid. If they’d picked a different part of the train, things might not have escalated. Or if their leader Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi) and his son Fani (Raghav Juyal) hadn’t realised they're travelling with Baldeo Singh and his family, whose ransom would be worth a lot more than the wallets and jewellery they’d planned to loot. But they begin near where Amrit and his soldier buddy Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) are sitting, and pretty soon the two commandos are smashing dacoit heads.

Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat dispenses with that most Indian of action staples, the hero entry scene (there’s a quick zoom on Lakshya instead). It’s a smart idea, keeping us guessing about Amrit’s capabilities until the fighting starts. Turns out he’s deadly efficient, lightning quick, tough like a bison. The goons keep coming, some of them armed, two with a significant size advantage over Amrit. Viresh is badly injured, and there’s the looming vulnerability of Tullika and her family. It’s not even halftime and already it feels like five action films’ worth of broken bones and grisly deaths.

From the time it premiered at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, Kill was promoted as the most violent Indian film ever made. It is that, by some distance. Faces are smashed to pulp, torsos slashed open, bodies slammed sickeningly into hard surfaces. It would be easy to accuse Kill of setting itself up as an endurance test. But it goes beyond that. A genuinely upsetting darkness settles over the film by the halfway mark. There’s a moment when you realise Amrit’s been holding himself back; it’s both exhilarating and sickening. His kills after that are different—less efficient, more cruelly drawn out.

Kill has been billed as ‘Raid on a train’, a feisty claim, considering how highly regarded Gareth Evans' 2011 film is. Yet, the action in The Raid, brutal as it was, has an exhilaration and showmanship that’s deliberately absent from Bhat’s film. The pitiless tone of Kill is closer to something like Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes For Us. Se-yeong Oh brings his experience of working on Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer—another film set on a train—to the close-quarters combat here (he shares action director duties with Parvez Sheikh, whom he worked with on War). It's a tremendous feat of sustained action choreography, never pretty or showy but maintaining a cold clarity throughout.

In August last year, a Railway Protection Force officer on a Mumbai-Jaipur train shot dead three Muslim passengers and a Hindu constable. This hate crime occurred after the film was completed, but the memory hovers over it, especially when a young Muslim man, Arif, is murdered (the boy’s family later helps Amrit, saying, “If only we’d acted sooner that time…”). Kill isn’t a political film, yet its gut-churning violence feels in step with a time when videos of lynching and flogging shot by the perpetrators play on primetime news and circulate on WhatsApp. It's almost a cliche—despite Juyal’s chillingly funny turn—to have a certain profile of north Indian male as clannish, misogynist villains. But I did find it intriguing how little patriotic hay the film makes of the fact that its ‘rakshak’ (‘protector’, which Fani spins as ‘raakshas’, ‘demon’) is a soldier. Not one flag is fluttered; Amrit never alludes to duty or national pride. It may not seem like much, but this flies in the face of most recent Indian action cinema, which treats the military with uncritical reverence.

The violence is shocking in and of itself, but is made even harder by the emotionality it’s wrapped up in. Lakshya doesn’t speak much, but you can see Amrit’s changing mental state—fury, panic, despair, derangement—writ on his face. And though the dacoits are wholly unsympathetic, the film still treats their losses as significant; their anguish at each new corpse is genuine. Kill’s violence will seem extreme and off-putting to some, but it forces the audience to deal with the actuality of violence in a way I’ve hardly ever seen done. Which brings me back to the audience at my screening.

Kill isn't really a hell-yeah action film. There’s no slo-mo, no release, no breathing room. The screen is a mess of flailing limbs and bloodied bodies. Distressing things happen to good people. Nevertheless, throughout the film, people in the hall kept trying to cheer. As Amrit started to really lean into his kills, the whoops and whistles became louder. Here I was having trouble breathing and people were reacting like it's RRR.

I’m not saying viewers shouldn’t want Amrit to bash Fani’s face in. But there’s something disturbing in seeing a crowd enjoy a level of violence that’s clearly dialed up to induce discomfort. The film never infantilizes its brutality—everyone on the train apart from the soldiers and the dacoits looks utterly horrified. But Indian audiences expect to have their violence mediated by heroism or fantasy. At one point Amrit shoves a Zippo can into a dacoit’s mouth and lights it on fire. As his screams filled the hall, I heard people laugh—which was scarier than what I’d just watched.

“This willing dissociation of response from violent spectacle has a downside… we become inured to actual violence when it excites us; we forget that there’s pain and death, we become connoisseurs of spectacle,” American critic David Denby wrote in 2012. Kill holds a mirror to actual violence, it’s full of pain and death, yet people were willing it to be a spectacle. I wonder if they’d see any difference between this and when Ranbir Kapoor goes on a murder spree in Animal. The day someone mashes up scenes from Kill with ‘Arjan Vailly’, you'll know the point has truly been missed.