{TIFF 2026} A Very Neon Kick On

Some movies ease you in. Kick On does not have the patience for that. Nick Kozakis’s new Australian nightmare drops you into the action almost before you’ve settled into your seat, and it never really lets up. Likw pretty much ever. Which is either the film’s greatest strength or perhaps so exhausting you use the restroom just to get break. Maybe both. Probably both.

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Here’s the conceit. Four friends, deep into a night of partying, and eventually fighting before they decide they’re not ready to go home. So they head to an after-party at the aparentment of belonging of Ray (Nikolai Nikolaeff), the volatile son of a local Russian mobster, tucked atop a crumbling high-rise in one of Melbourne’s rougher corners. It’s the kind of decision that looks fine at 2am and catastrophic by morning. A rash moment triggers a killing with far too many witnesses, and the group finds itself trapped in what was supposed to be a lavish playground and is now, very quickly, a blood-soaked asylum where the inmates are clearly in charge.

And look, watching these four stumble into this mess, I couldn’t help but think about my own young adulthood, which involved considerably less neon and considerably fewer mobsters. These people are having a way better time than I ever did. Way more fun, right up until they don’t.The college debate team never smoked crack and stabbed each other so maybe my early twenties weren’t that bad.

Kozakis stages the ascent into Ray’s lair like he’s sending his characters up into something mythic, and there’s a real Willy Wonka energy to it, if Wonka’s factory had been furnished by a cartel instead of the Oompa Loompa union and staffed with slightly disturbed underlings. Deep down the hole we go, and the deeper we get, the less anyone is getting back out clean. The production design leans hard into that idea, all cramped hallways and stairwells that seem to fold in on themselves, and the building itself becomes as much a character as anyone in the cast.

Visually, the film is drenched in color, and I mean drenched. Every frame is soaked in neon, and Kozakis clearly isn’t interested in a single boring composition. Some of the exterior tenement shots carry a real Candyman-in-Chicago quality to them, all that crumbling architecture photographed like it’s beautiful and still rotten. It’s a striking choice and it mostly pays off.

The influences here aren’t subtle, and Kick On doesn’t seem to want them to be. There’s a heavy dose of Gaspar Noe’s Climax running through the back half, all writhing bodies and creeping dread dressed up as a party gone off the rails. It also wants some of the swagger and comedy of Smoking Aces, though it trades that film’s gleeful mayhem for something considerably bleaker. Make of that what you will. Its most obvious cousin is Green Room, which Kick On resembles in structure more than execution. It doesn’t have quite the airtight story that Jeremy Saulnier’s film does, but it compensates with sheer intensity, and by the time the group’s situation curdles from bad to genuinely dire, you feel it.

That inciting incident takes its time arriving, and just like in Green Room, that’s by design. The pacing gives the whole film a sense of inevitability, like the walls are closing in slowly enough that you can watch it happen and still can’t do anything about it. There’s a stretch near the end of the first act, a five minute sequence I won’t spoil, that had me genuinely biting my nails off. Few horror films this year have built tension that patiently and that well.

Kavenagh, who’s clearly using this as a chance to show range well outside the Rings of Power sandbox, is the film’s anchor, and she’s quite good, fully committed even when the material asks her to go to some genuinely ugly places. There’s a brutal, naive confidence running through a lot of these characters, particularly the young men in the group, and the film seems to understand exactly how dangerous that confidence is, even when they don’t. It is almost always the women with these men that are the collateral damage and that feels very intentional.

The action itself lands on the good side of decent. It’s not going to reinvent anything, but it’s shot with enough clarity and kineticism that you always know what’s happening and to whom, which is more than plenty of bigger budget films manage these days. There are surprisingly fun moments scattered throughout, little flashes of dark comedy that keep the film from becoming a total slog through anxious misery. There’s a grungy, grim quality to the whole production that adds real weight to its visceral moments. This isn’t a slick, polished nightmare. It feels lived in, sweaty, a little sick, and that texture and grain of the film does a lot of heavy lifting.

If there’s a stumble, it’s the start of the third act, which stalls out a bit right when the film should be tightening the screws further. It’s basically the only real chance the movie gives you to breathe, and after two acts of relentless forward motion, that pause is more noticeable than it probably should be. That being said all of us have to breath and it was important to take a big deep breath before that final rollercoaster drop.

Still, Kick On is a confident, nasty little machine of a movie, one that knows exactly what kind of midnight crowd it wants and delivers for them almost the entire way through. Kozakis has assembled something that earns its comparisons even when it doesn’t quite match them, and that’s more than most films swinging this hard can claim. We caught Kick On as part of the Toronoto International Film Festival.