“Honestly, I’m a moody bastard, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Rahul Kohli says on a New York City sidewalk, navigating the clouds of both humidity and fatigue. “I just got in this morning, and I gotta bounce tonight,” he says, in town for a film festival. Perhaps the situation justifies an element of his mood (a central argument in all studies of depression), though it’s certainly appropriate for the film he’s in New York for, Mali Elfman’s debut feature Next Exit. Case in point — the title of the movie takes its syntax from one of the most famous instruction manuals for peaceful assisted suicide, Final Exit, which has sold over two million copies including countless more online views. None of this is a cup of grade-A sunshine.
Next Exit Follows Rahul Kohli and Katie Parker on a Death Drive
Next Exit is about two mismatched individuals ride-sharing a road trip, with their assisted suicide as a destination point (though, as writer Martin Buber has said in The Legend of Baal-Shem, “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware”). The film takes place in a world in which ghosts are all but proven to exist, and a massive, volunteer-based scientific study (basically a mass collective suicide) is being held to advance the research, led by a doctor played by Karen Gillan (who seems contractually obligated to never speak with her beautiful Scottish accent in a movie).
Kohli plays Teddy and Katie Parker plays Rose, the incongruous pair on multi-day death drive. Kohli, perhaps best known for his fantastic turns in the series iZombie and the Mike Flanagan horror series Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Bly Manor, spoke to us recently during a hectic day in which he likely would’ve wished the world away.
Next Exit is a Moody Movie, Too
The universe is a cruel and unpredictable landlord, and it will raise your rent or kick you by the wayside. This is a sentiment stolen from and expressed by the great ’90s band Bedhead in their song The Unpredictable Landlord:
“Your unhappy accidents want a word with you. Your tenants of contingency want to speak to you. These conditions deserve attention. This place where we live is unhealthy,” the song goes.
Next Exit depicts two people who are ready to die in this “unhealthy place,” and yet the pair couldn’t be any different, at least from the initial onset. Parker opens the film selling a television to a handsome young man, except that when he comes on to her, she throws the TV down a flight of stairs and steals his money, using the fire escape to duck out. Rose is infuriated by the fact that anyone would like her because she hates herself to a degree that results in a great deal of cynical sarcasm, the most comforting refuge for self-loathers who’d rather box mirrors than accept their reflection.
Kohli plays Teddy, a more slap-happy suicide who has learned to lose well, who seems eager for any comedy routine but may just be a husk whose interior has withered away with family failures and fury for fathers. The two of them drive cross-country to their appointment with the beloved reaper in this world gone mad, as strangers step out into the road with “thank you” signs taped to them, hoping to die, and homicides grow exponentially.
Next Exit Finds Rahul Kohli in an Existential Crisis
Like The Leftovers, HBO’s most underrated show, Next Exit presents a world fundamentally off its axis as something metaphysically massive has disrupted reality as people know it, causing a total existential crisis for every character. This was, according to Jewish theologian Martin Buber, how many Jews and people of faith felt after the Holocaust. How do you live in a world that has broken its own rules?
Next Exit seems to suggest that you live by being compassionate, understanding that everyone is in the same awful boat, and finding yourself in the nature of someone else and likewise. “This is the kind of place you wouldn’t drag your mother into. Even though everyone’s mother brought everyone here. But if I had been in her place, I can’t say I wouldn’t have done things the same,” that aforementioned Bedhead song goes. As the film goes on to explicate, there is a way to find meaning within meaninglessness by experiencing human connection — “All real living is meeting,” Buber said in his seminal book I and Thou; “the world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”
You also do it by just having as good a time as possible with whomever you can find to share it. “I’m an atheist,” Kohli says, cars fuming beside him on wet New York streets. He continues:
I don’t believe in an afterlife. I believe that you are born, and die, and that’s it, and that this is the vacation. If you’re lucky, you get a 75-year, 85-year vacation, and it’s up to you to fulfill it and maximize it without hurting anyone as best you can. And that’s what I’m doing. I’m enjoying the ride, and I’m trying to make myself happy and learn the things I want to learn and meet the people I want to meet. That’s it, and then that’s a wrap. It’s just a holiday.
Mali Elfman’s Film Next Exit Premiered at Tribeca
Kohli’s more literal and less existential holiday was in New York at the time, where he was attending the revered Tribeca Film Festival for Next Exit. Despite being a central figure in some major projects (and arguably the best part of the brilliant Midnight Mass), Kohli had actually never been to a film festival before he attended this screening on June 10th, 2022. “Not even as just an attendee,” he elaborates, “so to be here for a premiere of a movie that I’m a part of is a pretty special way to do it.”
Don’t get him wrong though — like Next Exit, he’s self-admittedly moody, and he understands the inherent futility of these things. “Really, I’m good, I’m very comfortable just in my pants [colloquial British slang for underwear], drinking a cup of tea and ignoring everything,” Kohli says. However, like the aforementioned sentiments regarding human compassion and the essentiality of encounter, Kohli is ultimately at Tribeca for one main reason. “The special thing, for me, is kind of watching Mali [Elfman, the writer and director] experience her movie being put out there, and getting to talk about it. It’s been 10 years for Mali, and it’s her feature directorial debut,” Kohli says, “that’s what I’m here for.”
Mali Elfman’s film ostensibly becomes about what makes life worth living when every day is filled with shame and pain, and like the film, Kohli has generally found the answer in his working relationships and the genuine connections he’s established and artistic admiration he has developed along the way. Kohli is the kind of actor who loves directors; “I’ve always been waiting for someone to be my Scorsese,” he says. It’s clear how much respect he has for the craft, and how much decent human affection he has for Elfman and everyone else he works with.
“Mali was very encouraging of me,” Kohli says, elaborating on the freedom he had during the production of being able to “go off the page” with confidence and support. Elfman’s film feels loose in the sense of a great road trip movie, and Kohli describes the shooting of Next Exit as a kind of road trip itself, one “which was being mirrored in the production itself,” he says, as they “were holed up in a motel for two weeks, and we’d use that motel for filming.” The concept of a road trip is an apt (if cheesy and thus hole-filled) metaphor for life itself, something Next Exit maps out wonderfully, and Kohli’s career has embarked down a new path thanks to the direction of Mike Flanagan.
Rahul Kohli on Mike Flanagan
Kohli and Parker, stars of Next Exit, have worked individually and together for writer/director Mike Flanagan throughout the years, and Mali Elfman has produced his work in the past, so it’s safe to say that the specter of Flanagan haunts Next Exit in certain tangential ways. In fact, Kohli and Parker have been working on Flanagan’s upcoming Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher, based on the legendary Edgar Allen Poe text. Kohli describes how he got involved with the project (and how Next Exit was good enough to distract from working with Flanagan):
I was told about it during Midnight Mass, and Mike told me who he wanted me to play. To be honest, the material’s fantastic, but I don’t really care about the material, I care about the man. Mike has been, well, I’m just so fortunate that our paths have crossed, that I was cast in The Haunting of Bly Manor and from there, we’ve had a friendship and professional relationship blossom to the point where, to a certain degree, I don’t really feel like working with anyone else but Mike, and it takes really fucking strong material to block out some time that isn’t for Mike, and that’s what Next Exit was.
Considering the greatness of Mike Flanagan’s movies and series, it’s a testament to Next Exit that the project was enticing enough to distract key Flanagan players like Kohli and Parker. This film that they worked on and the series they’ve made and will surely continue to make with Flanagan is a good example of Next Exit‘s thesis, of how to find meaning in meaninglessness. It’s truly beautiful that these creative personalities have been able to find something meaningful to work on together time and time again because these things mean a lot when the world is often isolating and painful; “The ceiling’s leaking from everywhere, bricks and beams are falling from the sky, and no one deserves to live here,” that Bedhead song goes. But there’s another line in the song, a small one situated in the middle, which simply says, “Everyone deserves decency.”
Next Exit and the work Kohli has done with Flanagan is art about empathy and the sometimes painful necessity of finding some kind of connection with other people, and the difficult but important need to be a decent person in a terrifying world. It’s clear from talking to him and from watching Next Exit that, for Kohli, like the contours of the road trip within the movie itself, was worth the detour. Next Exit premiered at Tribeca on June 10th.
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