Toxic looks spectacular, but beneath its glossy, brutally violent exterior lies a hollow, confused film that mistakes style and swagger for substance, observes Sreeju Sudhakaran.
Key Points
- Despite stunning visual aesthetics and high production values, Toxic has a confused narrative and an excessive runtime of nearly three hours and 20 minutes.
- Female characters, including those played by Nayanthara, Kiara Advani and Tara Sutaria, are poorly developed and primarily serve the male lead's storyline, failing the Bechdel Test.
- Yash's dominant performance, while showcasing his trademark swagger, often overwhelms the film and leads to 'hamming', with supporting characters remaining underdeveloped.
Toxic is certainly an experience.
It is a bold, provocative film that occasionally stuns you with visual aesthetics on par with a big-budget Hollywood production. Almost every frame looks striking. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the actual movie buried beneath that glossy, brutally violent exterior.
Going exorbitantly huge and ambitious for her Kannada debut, Director Geetu Mohandas has delivered a violent saga that cannot seem to decide whom it wants to please.
Is Toxic pandering to Yash's massive fanbase post-KGF, or is it aiming for audiences hoping she would inject her trademark character-driven, dramatic sensibilities into a masala actioner?
The result is a film stuck in no man's land. It offers flashes of Yash's beloved swagger, awkwardly mashed with a half-baked psychological exploration of a man facing his life's toxic mistakes in human form.
At nearly three hours and 20 minutes long, the movie is undeniably 'toxic' to our time and patience.
The blame should not rest entirely on Geetu Mohandas. Her visual treatment, at the very least, makes the film gorgeous to look at, even as the narrative crumbles around it. A fair share of the blame belongs to Yash, who is not just the lead star but also a co-writer and co-producer, guaranteeing his heavy involvement in shaping this mess.
What's Toxic About?
Toxic is a gangster drama spanning decades, laser-focused on one man: Raya (Yash). He is a violent, hypersexual gangster ruling a Portuguese-controlled Goa in 1947, who genuinely cares for his elder sister, Ganga (Nayanthara).
While engaged to Rebecca (Tara Sutaria), the daughter of a powerful rival crime lord, Raya becomes obsessed with Nadia (Kiara Advani), the star performer of a travelling circus.
They begin a sexual relationship, and Raya experiences something he never thought possible: Genuine feelings for a woman. This vulnerability costs him dearly when rivals exploit the situation, leading to a messy shootout with massive, damaging implications.
This trauma pushes an already toxic man into further toxicity. He goes on a rampage of alcohol, sex, and murder, violently pushing away the woman he loves and the son she bears. The rest of the film is essentially him facing the consequences of that abandonment as his son evolves into a far more violent, erratic reflection of himself.
Trying to gather his scattered thoughts on an equally scattered movie, Sreeju Sudhakaran shares five reasons why Toxic completely missed the mark for him.
Style Over Substance
During a pre-release event, Geetu Mohandas revealed that Yash made her watch K S Ravikumar's Padayappa while she introduced him to Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood For Love. She claimed Toxic would be an amalgamation of both.
Watching the film, you can clearly see what she was reaching for. The lighting, set design, locations, and camerawork boast a distinct, heavily layered visual appeal, making it one of the most lushly shot Indian movies in recent memory.
At the same time, it desperately wants to be a hyper-masculine, mass-appeal action film with punchlines that love to rhyme.
Yet, you also see exactly why this forced marriage of styles completely fails. In trying to blend international aesthetics with mass flavour, the film severely undercuts its own characters and story.
You get the swag, the styling, and the sex appeal, but you get absolutely none of the soul, the emotion, the pain, or the genuine anguish of the characters, even when they are literally screaming in your face.
This is incredibly frustrating for a film trying to portray a powerful brother-sister bond, a man reluctantly finding love, and a deep psychological exploration of guilt.
Toxic ultimately feels like a beautifully carved shell with absolutely nothing inside, save for the sheer aura of its leading man.
Poorly Sketched Female Characters
As someone who loved Geetu Mohandas' previous indie films (Liar's Dice, Moothon), I cannot overstate my disappointment here, particularly regarding the female characters.
The film heavily advertised five leading ladies who are presented quite gorgeously on screen, but every single female character is designed exclusively to orbit the central male hero.
It is deeply ironic that a film helmed by a female director, featuring five major actresses, utterly fails the Bechdel Test.
Nayanthara persists purely because of a tragic backstory involving sexual abuse. Yet, her pain exists solely to explain why Raya transformed into the person he is. Despite her supposed authority over him, she remains entirely peripheral to his actual storyline.
Kiara Advani gets ample amount of screen time as the woman who finally cracks Raya's emotional armour. Flitting through several highly stylised lovemaking scenes, she gets a flimsy character arc that abruptly extinguishes in a melodramatic, drunken mess.
Tara Sutaria is collateral damage in the dominant love story.
Huma Qureshi plays an antagonist credited with forcing a major dramatic shift for the hero, only to have her arc abruptly wrapped up afterwards.
Rukmini Vasanth walks in during the second half with the most sketchily written part of all. Seeing her talents wasted here after her incredible performance in Kantara: A Legend Chapter 1 was incredibly underwhelming.
Despite claims from the star and director that Toxic would be feminist, the 'feminism' seemingly means their existence MUST revolve entirely around the male lead's love, lust, or hatred.
Oh, and there is a random action scene where Raya beats up a squad of female assassins. Women empowerment, yay!
A Yash-Dominant Show That Overwhelms The Film
This is the Yash show through and through. The first half is mostly dedicated to presenting his trademark swagger, feeling like a direct spill-over from the KGF franchise, just with added sex appeal. (Funnily enough, the intimacy involves all sorts of grunting and thrusting, but absolutely no kissing.)
The second half demands some actual dramatic heavy lifting, particularly after the introduction of the 'younger' Yash.
The actor successfully distinguishes the two personas by giving the younger version a hyperactive, erratic body language, though he frequently crosses the line into pure hamming.
Under this complete dominance, the rest of the film simply surrenders, existing only to make him look cool. The supporting cast barely leaves a mark.
The highly talented Sudev Nair is present throughout the entire film as Raya's trusted right-hand man, but he gets maybe three lines of dialogue. I honestly did not even catch his character's name.
Yash's own character arc feels highly disconnected, only getting somewhat interesting in the third act thanks to a major twist that is absolutely guaranteed to divide fans online.
One of Yash's characters in the film even says there is no heroes in the movie, only villains. Which is fine, but when you show a sort of moral redemption, we need to feel that. Which is lost in the Yash swag show.
PS: Why does every character's emotional devolution needs them to be a drunken mess?
=That WTF Finale Twist
Toxic gains a slight sliver of momentum when Raya's lookalike, yet beardless, parkour-loving, ultra-violent son, who calls himself 'Ticket', enters the fray.
It briefly feels like the movie finally has an actual plot, even if we have seen the 'estranged, violent father-son dynamic' play out recently in films like GOAT.
But then, Geetu Mohandas drops a massive, reality-bending twist. This specific plotline is almost certainly what convinced Yash to greenlight the script. While I will not spoil it here, it is an extremely bold, unexpected play for a mainstream commercial movie of this scale.
The core idea was undeniably interesting. Watching Raya confront years of psychological neglect and suppressed guilt in such a literal, unexpected manner is a genuine 'gotcha' moment.
However, when you actually think about how the movie builds to that reveal, it feels incredibly manipulative. It does not feel brilliant; it just feels like cheap shock value.
Even the wildly ambitious finale fight in a snow-laden landscape, which attempts to blend explosive action with Raya surrealistically embracing his past mistakes, ends up feeling like a cool visual idea that ultimately hands the film a very hollow, empty conclusion.
Doesn't Change The Game
I know there is a massive audience out there for hyper-masculine, testosterone-fuelled films like KGF, Animal, and Dhurandhar. But the sheer celebration of toxic masculine swagger in these movies rarely appeals to me, especially when it actively sacrifices every other element needed to make a genuinely good and captivating film.
Despite what the trailers hinted at, I hoped Geetu Mohandas' involvement meant Toxic would offer something different.
It only stands out in its visual execution. Otherwise, it is incredibly hard to separate Toxic from the rest of the pack. In fact, it is much more cumbersome, drawn-out, and not bringing enough of the sheer crowd-pleasing mass moments that made KGF work.
At times, it just felt like a bizarre, beautifully shot fanboy tribute to Kabir Singh, KGF, and Animal. Sure, the film technically ends with the protagonist accepting that his toxicity has destroyed everyone around him.
But the messy, convoluted manner in which the movie reaches that conclusion proves it is entirely confused about whether it wants to glorify that behaviour or condemn it. What we get in the end is simply a complete tabaahi of our expectations.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
