John Wick on a train
The inescapable costs of violence.
As I’ve gotten older, my taste for violence has changed quite dramatically. I knew it was happening when Jason killed the fake-out Final Girl in the Friday the 13th reboot because, when he tossed her body aside, I whimpered, “her parents won’t even know where to find her.” I still love goopy practical effects1 and well-choreographed chase/fight scenes, but pain and death just land heavier on me at 37 and they did at 17.
Still, for reasons that others can diagnose because I don’t care to, I tend towards violent movies for comfort. And I’ve been needing a lot of comfort these past few weeks! The other night, the heartsickness that kept bubbling up was over Trump and Netanyahu’s comments about Palestinians and Gaza. The unchecked cruelty is just beyond anything I can really comprehend, frankly. So I was looking for some escapism.
Video essayist Patrick Willems did an incredible two-parter on the specific delights of train movies, which gave me a lot of movies for my Letterboxd watchlist. Kill was right at the top of that list, despite my knowing very little about it. I knew that it’s a rare Hindi entry in the ultraviolent action canon, that it takes place almost entirely on a train, and that the relentless and repetitive nature of the violence— that it’s mostly contained to a few carriages, even—was intentional. That’s pretty much it. Which meant that I absolutely fell for all of the tonal trickery of Kill’s first act.
Note: It will be really hard to discuss this one without giving away plot details, so before I get into it, let me just say: movie great. Exceptional, even. As shockingly emotional as it is shockingly violent, and pulling off an incredible feat of tonal balance. I’ll give you the synopsis and the trailer, and then you can make your own decisions about how to proceed.
Synopsis: When an army commando finds out his true love is engaged against her will, he boards a New Dehli-bound train in a daring quest to derail the arranged marriage. But when a gang of armed bandits begin to terrorize innocent passengers on his train, the commando takes them on, one by one.
From here on out, there will be spoilers. Also, content warning for descriptions of some mind-boggling violence.
For the first 10 minutes or so, Kill sets itself up as an over-the-top action romp with some cheesy romance at its core. The music stings alone are so bombastic that I fully let my guard down, expecting something like RRR meets Bullet Train. So, larger-than-life fun (RRR; complimentary) and necessarily propulsive (Bullet Train; neutral), but ultimately, a trifle (Bullet Train; derogatory). I even let myself fall in love with hero Amrit’s impossibly enchanting love interest Tulika, whose spiky intelligence and whimsical sense of humour immediately undercut the typical Action Movie Love Interest archetype. (The below video won’t do English subtitles, but the dialogue goes back and forth between English and Hindi, and I trust you can get the vibes.)
The music stopping for her to take off her other engagement ring is just the cutest thing. She’s undeniable.
The first act of violence, committed by disarmingly charming main antagonist Fani, is a cartoonish jolt. You know Fani is up to something, but going from offering to mentor the ticket collector’s son at college to splitting the ticket collector’s skull with a machete rather kicks things up a notch, energy-wise. Honestly, the entire setup and payoff of their conversation is a microcosm of what the movie is up to. In something like Bullet Train, the ticket collector’s death would be a blasé punchline. But in the few moments we get with this man, we learn how devoted he is to his son, and how nervous he is for the boy to start college away from home. When he’s killed, we know someone is going to miss and mourn him.
The mourning takes up an unreal amount of space in this movie, considering its originally jaunty tone. The 40-odd bandits who wreak havoc on the train are all members of an extended family. Once Amrit starts killing in earnest and the movie goes from action thriller to relentless horror, his foes aren’t just nameless baddies whose deaths are just there for gorehounds to cheer over. Every single person has someone there mourning him—a parent, a brother, an uncle. Even the more operatic deaths are haunting, because they’re being witnessed by loved ones.
And while some of those witnesses find a propulsive rage to keep them moving, many more of them are increasingly weighed down by the accumulating grief. The bandit kingpin2’s nephews plead with him at one point to abandon their revenge plot so they can leave this hellscape of a train physically intact, if not spiritually. Vengeance doesn’t restore anyone, and all of the continued justifications for more violence fall flat.
Even Fani, the bandit princeling3 whose brutality keeps kicking off a new round of violence, is horrified by our hero’s seeming soullessness. When they finally face off, Fani asks Amrit, “what kind of person kills like this? I killed four of your people. You killed 40 of my family.” I’ve seen this movie called John Wick on a train, and there are absolutely some narrative similarities; but here, the violence isn’t badass. I wasn’t thrilled to see the mustache-twirling villain get his shit ruined by an exquisitely grumpy Keanu Reeves, or getting a gleeful catharsis out of it. In Kill, I was just relieved that Amrit’s siege was over, and also quite sure that he would never know peace again.
Violence corrodes everyone it touches, from its victims to its witnesses to its perpetrators. It robs us of our humanity. I feel so weighed down by the violence my country perpetrates in my name. By the fact that my country helped lay waste to an entire people and paid for it with my tax dollars. By the fact that there are voters who felt they had a hopeless choice, and who have gotten something even worse than we had the capacity to imagine. By the fact that we’re witnessing yet another impossibly cruel chapter in Palestinian history play out. We are lessened by every death we pay for, and every one of those deaths leaves behind someone to miss and mourn them. Something in my subconscious wanted to make sure that I couldn’t escape that truth, even as my conscious self looked for some escapism. But, as usual, I do appreciate the chance to partake in some cinematic therapy.
My tattoo artist and I first bonded over our favourite Jason kills, actually
official terminology, don’t worry about it
Ibid.