TL;DR
Kill (2024) is a ferocious Hindi action thriller set almost entirely on a passenger train. Lakshya makes a fierce debut as a commando fighting off dozens of bandits, while Raghav Juyal turns charisma into menace as the villain. The story is thin, but the fight choreography, sound design, and claustrophobic tension make it one of the most brutal, inventive action rides of the year. Now streaming on Hulu.
Some action movies want to impress you; Kill wants to pin you to your seat. Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat builds a tight, Hindi-language brawler that takes place almost entirely on a passenger train where love, loyalty, and fury collide. If you come for the fight craft, you’ll get a masterclass in close-quarters chaos; if you come for a layered character study, you’ll get just enough fuel to keep the story engine burning while the film punches through carriage after carriage. This review unpacks what makes Kill both brutal and oddly beautiful—and who it’s really for.
Plot Overview: Violence on the Rails
Amrit (Lakshya), an NSG commando, slips onto a New Delhi-bound train to stop the arranged marriage of his love, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala). That mission derails when a crew of bandits—led by the swaggering, dead-eyed Fani (Raghav Juyal)—locks down sections of the train to rob passengers in waves. What begins as a heist becomes a siege, then a vendetta, as compartments turn into cages and every object becomes a weapon. The plot is intentionally lean: Kill strips story fat to foreground momentum and impact, trading subplots for a single, escalating corridor of consequences.
Deep Dive: Claustrophobia, Craft, and Controlled Carnage
Direction and visual language: Bhat’s best decision is geographic honesty. The fights aren’t edited into senseless puree; they’re staged so you feel the limits of a narrow aisle, the stutter of doors, the hard corners of luggage racks. Cinematographer Rafey Mehmood and editor Shivkumar V. Panicker collaborate on a rhythm that’s tight without turning into shaky noise: bursts of speed punctuated by clean impacts and brief, breath-catching resets.
Action design: The fight grammar is the film’s secret sauce. Action directors Oh Se-yeong and Parvez Shaikh emphasize “found” weaponry—extinguishers, bars, box cutters—choreographed with a blunt, inventive cadence that starts at intense and ramps to feral. It’s not ballet; it’s a meat grinder with rhythm.
Sound and score: The movie’s sound design is a character. Metal scrapes, bone-thuds, the compressed hush between stations—they’re all amplified to make each hit land in your chest. When the score swells, it pushes the scene rather than wallpapering it, letting gruesome beats sit uncomfortably long enough to register.
Performances:
- Lakshya arrives like a baton pass to a new action lead. He sells both trained efficiency and messy, human rage; the physical control is obvious, but the tiny flickers—breath patterns, micro-hesitations before a finishing move—give Amrit weight beyond stoic commando.
- Raghav Juyal weaponizes charisma. The more the film leans into horror-adjacent brutality, the more Fani’s swagger curdles into something queasier.
- Tanya Maniktala threads a difficult needle: Tulika is more than a plot coupon. Her scenes clarify stakes and give the violence moral shape; without them, Kill risks becoming mere technique reel.
Pacing and structure: The movie’s first stretch builds tension with surgical patience. Once the bandits lock the train down, the film shifts from thriller to endurance test. That gear-change can feel like whiplash if you expect traditional peaks and valleys, but it’s an intentional design: one long escalation with few exits, mirroring the train itself.
Comparisons: Critics have invoked The Raid for good reason—both films fetishize close-quarters creativity—but Kill earns its own identity by rooting the carnage in a very specific space (Indian passenger rail) and social texture (family ties among villains, a detail that adds queasy intimacy to some confrontations).
Context and pathway: Produced by Dharma Productions and Sikhya Entertainment, the film premiered in TIFF’s Midnight Madness and took the first-runner-up slot in the People’s Choice standings—rare air for an Indian actioner. That festival buzz fueled a wide rollout (including a U.S. theatrical opening) and even sparked a planned English-language remake from Lionsgate and 87Eleven (John Wick).
Runtime and discipline: At around 105 minutes, Kill is ruthlessly economical. Scenes that would be padding in a longer cut are replaced with escalation logic: each decision locks the train a little tighter, each fight invites nastier counter-tactics, and the film’s moral oxygen thins as the bodies pile up.
What We Loved: Standout Strengths
- Inventive, readable fight craft. The choreography exploits the train’s architecture—door frames, poles, racks—so every beat is legible and specific.
- Sound as sensation. Crunchy impacts and metallic textures make the violence tactile without drowning the track in anonymous noise.
- Lakshya’s action-star debut. Physical presence plus small emotional tells; it’s not just stunt competence, it’s character through kinetics.
- Raghav Juyal’s charismatic menace. Swagger that curdles into calculation—memorable without cartooning the villain.
- Purposeful economy. A tight 105 minutes with near-zero filler—rare for mainstream action.
What Fell Flat: Where It Strains
- Narrative thinness. The story is a delivery system for fights; that’s the design, but it means less room for layered arcs or surprising turns.
- Tone drift toward shock. As the brutality scales up, some beats flirt with horror excess. For some, that escalation will be exhilarating; for others, numbing.
- Emotional coverage. Tulika’s perspective grounds the stakes, but secondary characters often register as types. The film hints at a richer social web (family links among the bandits, class friction in the compartments) and then sprints past it.
Final Verdict: Board for the Brawl, Stay for the Craft
Kill is a brutalist showcase for close-quarters action that understands space, rhythm, and sound. It’s not here to weave an operatic epic; it’s here to test how much intensity a single location can sustain—and it turns out, quite a lot. If you crave tactile, inventive fights and can handle hard-R ferocity, this train is absolutely worth boarding. If you need layered subplots and generous character shading, the ride may feel too direct. Either way, it marks a milestone: a Hindi actioner that traveled from festival midnight madness to global buzz on the strength of its craft alone.
Kill is now streaming on Hulu, making it easy to jump aboard this claustrophobic action ride at home. And if you’re browsing Hulu already, don’t miss our review of Predator: Killer of Killers, another brutal showdown worth your time.
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