Kill is one of the most violent films ever to come out of India. Its own producer, Karan Johar, called it blood porn. It’s about a commando who fights forty knife-wielding dacoits on an overnight train and it does not flinch when a head splits. So the first surprising thing Nikhil Nagesh Bhat will tell you is that he didn’t build it out of fight scenes. He built it out of Aliens.
Bhat is a Mumbai-based director on his fifth feature, and Kill is the one that broke through: a Midnight Madness premiere at TIFF, a Tribeca berth, and a North American and UK release through Lionsgate. What carries the conversation, though, isn’t the festival run. It’s a thesis about why action only works when it’s standing on top of something else.
Action as a Byproduct
Most action directors talk about choreography. Bhat talks about the thing underneath it.
Action is just a byproduct of emotions.
Strip out the emotional arc, he argues, and the fighting is redundant, because the audience has no reason to be invested in mindless spectacle. Kill is engineered around that conviction. Amrit, a commando played by Lakshya, learns that the woman he loves, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), is being forced into an arranged marriage, and boards her New Delhi-bound train to stop it. Then a family of generational dacoits, led by Beni and his gleeful son Fani (Raghav Juyal), starts robbing the carriages, and the love story turns into a slaughter. Bhat calls it a love story at heart, then a story of loss, vengeance, and guilt. The carnage is the delivery system for all of it.
This is where I’ll plant a flag the conversation circles. The instinct with a film this brutal is to say the emotion excuses the gore. It’s the opposite. The gore is what makes the emotion legible. In a film willing to show you a head coming apart, restraint would read as cowardice, a director looking away from his own stakes. By refusing to cut away, Bhat makes you feel the cost of each body, so that when grief arrives it has weight you’ve physically absorbed. The violence isn’t decoration on a love story. It’s the love story’s proof.
What He Took From Aliens
When critics compared Kill to John Wick or The Raid, the confined-space brutality benchmarks the film clearly invites, Bhat kept pointing somewhere less expected: James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens.
What he saw in it wasn’t the marines or the firefights. It was the architecture underneath. Ripley protecting the girl Newt, the alien queen protecting her eggs: two mothers fighting for their young, a structure so clean you absorb it as pure survival tension without ever noticing the design. Bhat also marvels at the pacing, the way Cameron sets the entire crisis inside the first few minutes the way The Terminator does, then lets you wait for the inevitable. He quotes Frank Capra approvingly: there are no rules in filmmaking, only sins, and the cardinal sin is dullness. His first two features, he admits, weren’t fully conscious of how much pace was doing. Kill is.
The two-mothers clarity has a direct echo in Kill: a protagonist whose entire engine is protecting the people in his care, a simple, direct line of desire that the action complicates but never muddies. Compared to the relentless, almost abstract body count of Train to Busan, another film that traps its people in a hurtling train, Kill keeps tying every kill back to a relationship.
A Villain Named Fani
Bhat is more interested in the antagonist than the hero. The Goliath, he says, matters more to him than the David, because the opposition is what generates the story; the protagonist mostly reacts. He name-checks Hans Gruber as a favorite, and the structural debt to Die Hard is plain, one trapped man, a contained space, a charismatic villain. The twist is where the humor lives. In Die Hard it comes from Bruce Willis. In Kill it comes from Fani.
That choice is rooted in something real. Bhat grew up in a lawless part of India where he watched crime up close, and the criminals he knew weren’t snarling devils. They were charming, good-looking, funny. He played cricket for months with a guy who turned out to be a robber. So Fani isn’t a suave movie villain. He’s a likable young man with a great sense of humor who kills without a second thought, which is far more unsettling than any sneer, and which dares the audience into the queasy place where you almost root for him.
Getting It Made, Getting It Seen
The film got made because Guneet Monga said yes. Bhat brought the idea to the producer, who won an Academy Award for the short documentary The Elephant Whisperers and whom he’d known since her work on The Lunchbox a decade earlier, and warned her it would be difficult. Her answer, by his account, was that if it’s difficult, let’s make it. From there it went to Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, one of the largest studios in India, and out into the world through Lionsgate, which took North America and the UK, with the rest sold territory by territory across Europe, the Gulf, Japan, and Australia. Bhat is convinced the film translates everywhere, that the appetite for this exact thing runs through Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America alike.
He almost didn’t trust it himself. He finished Kill on the third of September and flew to its Toronto premiere on the sixth, which meant the first time anyone watched the finished film was days before a thousand strangers would. Sitting in the Midnight Madness crowd, the little voice started in: he hated the shots, the style, the music, all of it, and was sure the audience would tear it apart. Fifteen minutes in, they started reacting, and the room turned. He compared the feeling to watching Adam McKay sweat through a test screening of Vice, the particular terror of finally handing your peers a thing you’ve believed in for years. In Kill‘s case it was eight years, from a 2016 story to the screen, eight years of belief waiting to find out whether anyone shared it.
Practical by Necessity, Underdog by Temperament
The film looks handmade because it largely is. Bhat knew he couldn’t afford the VFX the carnage seemed to require, and waiting two or three years for effects work would have bled the budget further, so roughly sixty to seventy percent of what you see was achieved practically on set: prosthetics, blood, the tight close-quarters choreography that reminded Marcus of Rumble in the Bronx. The constraint reads as style. A bigger effects budget would have made it glossier and less alive.
That resourcefulness is of a piece with the film’s stated subject and the director’s self-image. Bhat is a self-described underdog, the black sheep who failed a school year and was written off, who lied to his parents about wanting to be a journalist because admitting he wanted to make films was unthinkable in the India of twenty-five years ago. He spent seven or eight years getting pitches rejected. His previous film took fourteen years to reach release. Rejection, he says, became the teacher.
If you can target people’s heart, I think you can tell a great story.
That’s the whole philosophy in one line, and it’s why Kill works on audiences who don’t normally reach for the goriest film in the room. The patience those rejection years forced on a self-described restless, impatient man is what now keeps him on set demanding one more take until the punch lands and the tear is real. The underdog learned to wait, and the waiting is what made the film hit as hard as it does.
