Kick On US première at Fantastic Fest, 19th Sept 2026
“Hey, you got anymore?”, Eden (Markella Kavenagh) asks her best friend Lee (Kaitlyn Boyé), just after snorting a line of cocaine in a nightclub bathroom, in words that are both the opening line of Nick Kozakis’ Kick On, and an expression of Eden’s committed, even compulsive hedonism.
The screenshot on the phone where Eden had lined up her toot displays a photo of her with her beloved sister Gracie (Lily Major) in happier times. Now Gracie is lying in a hospital bed at the ‘end stage’ of cancer, and the experimental treatment which is available only in the United States is beyond anything that Eden can afford. So here she is, trying to live her own life to the full, even to excess, for the both of them – and when she, her boyfriend Drew (Ras-Samuel), Lee and Lee’s brother Zack (Nikita Chronis) get roughly thrown out after a fight with some other clubbers, Eden is not yet ready for the night to end, and wants to ‘kick on’ to whatever other pleasures await in Melbourne’s darkness.
All four agree, with relative degrees of enthusiasm, to hit another club, but not before scoring some more coke – and so they enter the domain of Ray Patrinko (Nikolai Nikolaeff), a Russian dealer to one of Zack’s acquaintances. Ray lives in the penthouse of a high-rise building owned by his mobster father Fedi (Jacek Koman), and holds court to his henchmen Jase (Julian Weeks), Stav (Tyrone Ngatai) and cousin Yuri (Thom Green), and junkie hangers-on Tash (Lana Golja) and Anja (Finola Xie). When the four friends arrive, lonely, unloved Ray clearly wants his luxurious apartment to be their party venue rather than a mere pit stop, and insists that they hang around. He is welcoming, hospitable and more than generous with his booze and various illegal substances, but he also has both trust and daddy issues, is high on a tweaking binge, and is obviously all eyes for Eden – all of which makes for a heady cocktail in a house filled with drugs, thugs, weapons, hidden cash, molls and a mole. Soon the quartet of pleasure seekers will be fighting for their very lives – and that is before psychopathic papa and his terrifying enforcer Axel (Eddie Baroo) come to clean up the mess by making more of one.
“It’s funny, art imitates life imitates art,” Ray tells Jase. “We’re all just in one big Shakespearean tragedy.” Ray goes on to talk about Julius Caesar, “the most powerful man in Rome” whose betrayal and assassination at the hands of his friends and ‘brothers’ is famously a subject for Shakespeare’s drama. Ray – whose real name is in fact Roman – says this while standing before a large painting which portrays Caesar’s death in the senate house. Indeed, Ray identifies closely with Caesar. The most prominent of his many tattoos is the Caesarian quote VENI VIDI VICI, and he carries with him an ancient Roman coin (bearing the head of Caesar) which he, when intoxicated, flips to help him make binary decisions. Ray also suspects that everyone is out to stab him in the back – and his suspicions will soon be confirmed as circumstances and his own paranoia engender treachery all around, and as his own body becomes a canvas for wounds alongside the tats. Here betrayals abound, and the greatest ones are between blood. Indeed, there will be blood – as well as blunt-force injuries, vicious shankings, exploding heads, and neck ties made from tongues.
Beyond the classical and Shakespearean models resonating with Ray’s dynastic insecurities, there are other, more cinematic influences operating on the increasingly impossible predicament in which Eden and her friends find themselves caught. For their in-over-their-heads dealings with an armed, volatile drug dealer recall similar, and similarly super-suspenseful, sequences from Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), while their desperate, panicky beleaguerment evokes Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015), their location in a building full of addicts draws from Gareth Evans’ The Raid (2011), and the setting of the violence in an apartment full of aggressive Russians (and Oedipal conflict) points to Kirill Sokolov’s Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, Sdokhni, 2018). This building is not just daddy’s house, but also a towering edifice of genre, with Fedi’s powers of corrupting exploitation so great that they can keep the police (and the real world) out.
Co-writing with Phillip Klimek (who also, together with Gabriel Isaac Mounsey, composed the score), Kozakis has created an extremely tense crime thriller/domestic tragedy that tracks the overnight odyssey of a woman, trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time, who will learn, over this long dark night of the soul, the true price of Darwinian survival. With its dazzlingly hyperkinetic craft and brutal on-screen violence, Kick On manages to weave a whole labyrinthine world of nooks and crannies, lift interiors and crawlspaces into its near Aristotelian unity of time and place – and leaves you high on its buzz and, like Eden, wanting more. Following his excellent debut Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism (2023), this cements Kozakis as one of the most exciting voices in Australian genre cinema.
strap: Nick Kozakis’ hyperviolent tragic thriller sends four young partygoers into an unhinged underworld of paranoid dealers, vicious fathers and unloved sons.
© Anton Bitel
