Kill is having the kind of journey that every filmmaker aspires for his movie. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s directorial venture, starring Lakshya Lalwani and Raghav Juyal, premièred at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and was recently screened at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. The action fare— think stunts and gore along the lines of John Wick—is entirely shot on a train. The director’s next outing, Apurva, too is a survival tale. So, we begin our chat with the obvious question: what’s with the gore on screen? “I get that a lot, especially this year. I am told I need to go see a shrink,” he laughs. But Kill was written in 2020 during the pandemic. “I think the stress and insecurities that were pent up, were put on paper.”

Bhat’s Kill premièred at TIFF in September