KILL (2024)

Kill arrives with a premise lean enough to serve as a load-bearing beam. An army commando boards a New Delhi-bound train to intercept his girlfriend's arranged engagement. A gang of dacoits boards the same train to rob it. The agendas collide, and the next ninety minutes are knives, hammers, a lighter, and a great deal of blood in a narrow corridor. The film is inspired by a train robbery the director experienced in 1995, which explains the geography of the thing and nothing else about it. It premiered at Toronto's Midnight Madness, a venue that has never once asked a film to explain itself.

For the purposes of cultural classification, this is a barren field. The cast is entirely Indian because the film is a Hindi-language Indian production, a default and not a statement. The girlfriend exists to be stabbed and thrown from a moving train so that the hero may become upset. There is no environmental content. There is no economic critique, since the bandits want money and that is the whole of their politics. No engagement with bodily self-image, no neurodivergent characters, no reinterpretation of the historical record. The film does not lecture. It has no interest in our improvement. It wants to show us a man putting a hammer through another man, and then it wants to end.

The overall impression is of a production that read the room and concluded the room would prefer to be left alone. There is something almost restful in encountering a work with no instructional ambitions whatsoever. No sermon, no scolding, no homework. We score it accordingly, and we move on to the next screening.