Forget about expectations. Toxic lives up to its name. The full name though is Toxic : A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups. This should have rather been a Cautionary tale for Cinephiles.
Toxic has Yash in every frame. It is so single-mindedly dedicated to the service of its leading man that it refuses to let small niggles, like a coherent story, get in the way of its utter devotion. This is perhaps unsurprising given that Yash is not just the object of everyone’s attention on screen, but also serves as the co-producer and co-writer alongside director Geetu Mohandas.
Yet, even with two writers at the helm, the narrative remains frustratingly difficult to follow. One minute, the audience is relieved to see “GOA 1967” flash across the screen. But just when you think you have pinned down the geographical location and carbon-dated the film, the action abruptly shifts to snow-capped, Siachen-like mountains. How the characters seamlessly alternate between a blizzard and a circus is anyone’s guess!
The story however, is purely incidental. Yash plays a man on a mission and he is kept very busy doing two things: fighting and fornicating in no particular order of preference.
Where are the women, you ask? One is helming the project. If male directors have historically written female characters to color-correct misogyny as passionate, possessive love, Geetu Mohandas proves here that women are equally capable of romanticising toxic relationships on screen. A massive lineup of prominent actresses is sprinkled across the narrative. There is Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria, Kiara Advani, and Rukmini Vasanth but unless you are playing the hero’s sister, like Nayanthara, you are offered very little dignity or agency.
Having a protagonist with negative shades is never fundamentally the problem. Rather, it is the script’s reluctance to deep-dive into his flaws or hold him accountable that feels cowardly and covetous. Whether it is Kiara or Nayanthara, every character exists purely at the service of the main man. Yash, no doubt, gives the performance his all. He plays a double role and as a line of dialogue in the film suggests and I paraphrase – there are no heroes here, both characters are villains! Yash handles both versions with justice. Unfortunately, this self-contained dynamic means no one else has much to do anyway.
Ultimately, the film chooses to numb its audience into submission. It treats us to such an endless barrage of bloodshed, blown-up bodies, dismembered limbs, severed heads and charred mess that once the initial shock value wears off you feel absolutely nothing. The second half is significantly better, as we finally witness Raya (Yash) dealing with his past demons. However, the journey to that resolution is so frustrating and unnecessarily prolonged that one leaves the theatre feeling affronted and irritated.
Toxic is the sort of film where everyone simply screams. The characters do not organically respond to one another. Instead, they throw lines back and forth. For a project mounted on such a lavish canvas and backed by a massive budget, it is baffling that no one paid attention to the poorly written Hindi dialogues. The pedestrian Hindi dubbing only adds to the viewer’s woes.