‘John Wick Cracked Out on Meth’ Toronto Midnight Madness Film ‘Kick On’ Director Nick Kozakis Says Real Stunts Sell the Brutality

There’s a severed head on set, a childhood friend swinging fists in an elevator, and a director who wanted every drop of blood shot for real. Australian filmmaker Nick Kozakis’s action-horror film “Kick On” makes its world premiere in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness lineup.

The film begins with a night of partying that spirals out of control for four friends, who end up trapped in the opulent, drug-soaked home of a dangerous mobster’s son and must fight to survive amid mounting paranoia, violence and an eventual betrayal. Markella Kavenagh, known to audiences as Nori in Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” stars as Eden opposite Nikolai Nikolaeff as Ray.

In the film’s press notes, Kozakis wrote that he wanted “Kick On” to hit like “John Wick” cracked out on meth, describing the target sensation as “that wired, sweat-soaked, out of control energy.”

Coming from a music video background, Kozakis says he “really wanted to kind of get in tight, personal with all of our characters,” building a separate “character pass” of close-ups into every storyboarded sequence. “Style can always overtake,” he says, but he refused to sacrifice actors’ “reactions and fear… and all of those moments” for spectacle.

He says he leaned on real stunt performers rather than digital augmentation wherever possible, including casting a childhood friend who became a professional stuntman as the film’s doorman. “I can’t unsee like you need to play this character,” Kozakis says. “…It’s just like when he was doing the stunts in the previs, it’s like I didn’t want it to go to anybody else, you know?”

The film’s prosthetics came from designer Larry Van Duynhoven, whose recent credits include “Furiosa,” “Mortal Kombat” and “Bring Her Back.” Kozakis recalls Van Duynhoven bringing an exact head cast of actor Tyrone Ngatai onto set, moments before the crew destroyed it for a head-trauma effect. “It’s just so much more fun to be able to play with the practical elements,” Kozakis says.

Underneath the carnage, Kozakis says the script’s pull for him was a single scene: Eden sitting with her younger sister, Gracie, in the hospital, then going out that same night because she doesn’t know what else to do with her fear. “It’s a very humanized story and nothing’s ever black and white,” Kozakis says. He didn’t want the film’s young ensemble to read as “young dumb kids that are just lambs to the slaughter,” he says, so “we can care to scare.”

Kozakis says Eden’s reckless choices that night, including taking money to help Gracie, all trace back to chance. “This film plays a lot with the idea of chance,” he says, pointing to smaller decisions across the night, like whether to end things early or take one more stop, as the same instinct playing out again and again. “You hope that they always are for the right intention,” Kozakis says, “but it just goes so horribly wrong.”

That same idea of inheritance shapes Ray. Kozakis says he’s known people who “compensated for some pretty, you know, average father figures” and ended up carrying that same toxicity forward. Ray, he says, “never had a chance” against a father who was “overbearing” and expected him to follow in his footsteps. “He’s trying to be his own person, but you can just see that that doesn’t exist,” Kozakis says. “He was just born into this world of chaos and fear… and it’s just a sad state of affairs for him.”

Kozakis says Ray’s volatility, not villainy, is what makes him compelling to watch, even past a late heroic turn. “His heart is generally, I guess, in the right place, but his mind is all messed up,” he says. “He’s just fundamentally a broken person… despite the fact that he wants to do the right thing, he also takes every wrong turn.”

Kozakis says casting Nikolaeff was never in question. “He’s such an Energizer Bunny,” Kozakis says. “He has that presence on set.”

Kozakis previously directed the psychological thriller “Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism,” a film he calls “an experiment” born during COVID-era lockdowns. He says that lower-stakes shoot gave him room to “experiment, try different things” before applying those lessons at greater scale on “Kick On.” He is now moving on to “Off the Boat,” a comedy with the Sooshi Mango team funded by Screen Australia, with Village Roadshow attached for theatrical distribution. “I need to do some ethnic comedy, one because I’m Greek and it’s something that speaks to me and situations that I grew up in,” Kozakis says.

Kozakis, who has directed more than 100 music videos including Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey,” says that background shaped “Kick On’s” frenetic pace. The shoot ran about 20 days and required 1,536 setups, which he calls “a psycho amount.” The cast also includes Jacek Koman, Ras-Samuel, Nikita Chronis, Kaitlyn Boyé, Julian Weeks, Thom Green, Ngatai and Eddie Baroo.

Umbrella Entertainment is handling the film’s Australia-New Zealand theatrical release, with Blue Finch Films overseeing global sales.