Mumbai, India – When it was announced that Geetu Mohandas, a female director, would helm Yash’s next big-budget spectacle Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, many sensed there would be a catch. The teasers—featuring wild sex in a rocking car triggering an explosion at a graveyard—hinted at the machismo routinely reframed as aspirational bad-boyness by male directors. The subversion would come, but at what cost? For much of its 194-minute runtime, Toxic is not an antidote to those notorious male-gaze spectacles; it is one of them.
The film is a chain-smoking, sex-drenched, gore-dispensing gangster drama about a tortured monster named Raya (Yash), set in post-independence Goa that looks like Zack Snyder’s India. Raya smokes in slow-motion, enters every shot in super slow-motion, and kills while smoking. “Violence is my language, it’s universal,” he snarls. The film unfolds like one dizzying montage after another—resembling a condom-brand ad, a big-budget cigar commercial, a VFX showreel, or an expensive fan tribute to Tarantino and Wong Kar-wai. At one point, a gang of white nuns attack his restaurant, only to reveal themselves as latex-wearing ninjas. The pitch is so high that Toxic unfolds like a parody of itself, openly inviting the viewer into that “evaluate-me-for-what-I-am” territory.
The women in Raya’s life cater to different parts of his personality. His sister Ganga (Nayanthara) is his kingmaker; Rebecca (Tara Sutaria) is his carnal girlfriend; Nadia (Kiara Advani) is his soulmate who slaps him for disrespecting her but still purrs “I think you’re just toxic”; and Melissa (Rukmini Vasanth) is the mother of his child, a classy casino guest who falls for his self-destructive soul. Each woman becomes a prototype of the male-entitlement template, existing in service of Raya’s climb to the summit of the genre. They’re all obsessed with him for no reason other than his capacity to abuse the spotlight.
Then comes the twist in the climax—a big swing that upends the relationship with the movie. This final stretch reveals the extent of Geetu Mohandas’ ‘Trojan-Horse filmmaking’: a story that commits entirely to the grammar of the masses to craft a message of the classes. It employs all the aesthetics of the male gaze throughout to arrive at the one thing previous movies lack: the consequences of that gaze. The erosure of redemption. The home where the chickens come to roost. Raya’s reckoning happens at this volume too—a surreally snowy landscape, a dizzying smorgasbord of bullets and madness.
Perhaps we’ve reached a stage where creative conformism is the most effective form of dissent. The only way to rap the knuckles of a culture that romanticises misogyny is to first massage the hand. But the problem is how deep—and self-defeating—the subterfuge tends to be. It’s not an easy pill to swallow for viewers wired to use Vanga-sized yardsticks to judge entertainment. Will I watch it again? Probably not. Does it ask too much of the average watcher? For sure. But it’s hard to dismiss the courage of a movie prepared to lose itself in a quest to find its voice. It’s impossible not to admire the psychology of a film willing to be bad in its quest to weaponise its goodness.
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There are visuals towards the end that shoot ambitious arthouse arrows with mainstream bows, merging the toll of toxicity with the mentality of mayhem. When critic Richard Brody picked up the Roger Ebert quote, he called it out: “an accomplished realisation of a bad idea is hardly worth exalting.” But a stormy realisation of an accomplished idea is certainly worth noting. Notice the blurry faces walking out of a hall wondering if smoking is essential for boldness. Ask the people who exit Toxic wondering if they saw female rage and retribution camouflaged as a distinctly male tragedy.
