In response to classicist Emily Wilson’s rant about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, someone on X (formerly Twitter) quoted fabled film critic Roger Ebert about the intent of storytelling: “a movie should be evaluated for what it is and how it fully achieves the director’s vision”. How it’s basically unfair to pan movies for not being what you wish they were. Ebert’s opinion is often the crutch that many cinephiles and professional critics lean on to justify their moral stances on provocateurs like Sandeep Reddy Vanga: “judge Animal and Kabir Singh for what they are, not what you ‘wokes’ want them to be”. It’s a ready-made theory for moviegoers who have no other way to validate their kinks for stylised sexism and tortured megalomaniacs. They see it as a reflection of the world, conveniently ignoring the makers’ opportunistic fetishisations of it.
When I heard that a female director (Geetu Mohandas) was making the next movie of arguably India’s biggest superstar (Yash), and that this movie was going to be called Toxic, I sensed there would be a catch. Most of us did. The teasers — one of which featured wild sex in a rocking car that triggers an ‘explosion’ at a graveyard — hinted at the machismo that’s routinely reframed as aspirational bad-boyness by male directors. Even the tagline, “A Fairytale for Grown-Ups,” loosely translates to a cautionary tale about adults. The subversion would come. The only question was: At what cost?
For much of its 194 minutes, Toxic is not an antidote to those notorious male-gaze spectacles; it is one of them. It’s a chain-smoking, sex-drenched, gore-dispensing and porn-coded gangster drama about a tortured monster named Raya. The setting is post-independence Goa (which looks like Zack Snyder’s India). It screams and guffaws in a familiar tenor. Yash smokes in slow-motion, he enters every shot in super slow-motion, he shoots and kills while smoking and entering shots, he even thinks and speaks in slow-motion. “Violence is my language, it’s universal,” Raya snarls. It’s one dizzying montage after another. Every other sequence resembles either a condom-brand ad, a big-budget cigar and alcohol commercial, a VFX showreel, an exotic plea against gun-control and techno music, or an expensive fan-tribute to Tarantino and Wong Kar-wai movies. At one point, a gang of white nuns randomly attack his restaurant only to reveal themselves as latex-wearing ninjas who seem to be turned on by the prospect of a bearded opponent. 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. This is my director’s vision, it says, and it’s cooler and campier than your director’s vision.
The women in the beast’s life cater to different parts of his personality. His sister, Ganga (Nayantara), is his goddess and kingmaker who dreams of him avenging their childhood and ruling Goa; she will stop at nothing to protect him. The boss’ daughter, Rebecca (Tara Sutaria), is his carnal girlfriend who dreams of an unhinged future; she will stop at nothing to secure him. His soulmate, Nadia (Kiara Advani), is a circus star who dreams of a romantic relationship; she will stop at nothing to change him. When he acts all Kabir-Singh-ish and calls her “a bitch,” she slaps him for disrespecting her; when he asks if she thinks he’s a bad guy, she purrs “I think you’re just toxic”. In postcoital clarity (a car, where else?), she warns him to treat her like a lover and not an owner; one’s tempted to remind our sister that he’s named after a celebrity dating app in postcolonial India. Finally, the mother of his child, Melissa (Rukmini Vasanth), is a classy casino guest who falls for his self-destructive soul; she will stop at nothing to see sense.
Each of the women become prototypes of the male-entitlement template, existing in service of Raya and his noisy climb to the summit of this genre. They’re all obsessed with him for no reason other than his impressive capacity to abuse the spotlight. The design is blatant: from Kiara Advani’s casting to Rukmini Vasanth’s passing presence. At some point, a suggestive visual transition conflates the two young siblings to the two lovers in bed; at another, Raya’s answer to “what do you love about her?” is “I love the version of myself she brings out”. In fact, the second half plays out like a fan-fic version of an Animal sequel, where a demented son (also Yash) hunts down the wasted father who abandoned him. Endless action pieces stem from this generational rot; two villains go head to head in a plotline that keeps expanding its universe of sexy hyper-masculinity. The movie wastes no chance to ham it up and give the audience two superstars at the price of one. The word “daddy” is aggressively desexualised by the father-son chase. The film is meta in parts, sure, but a self-aware serial killer is still a serial killer.
Then comes the twist in the climax. It’s a twist that, I suspect, will be discussed and mocked in equal measure. It comes so late, too late almost, but there’s an audacity about it that upends our relationship with the movie — and by extension, the genre fatigue it represents. On paper, it feels like a last-ditch gimmick. But it’s a big swing, and precisely the catch some of us expected to see when we first heard of a movie called Toxic. This final stretch reveals the extent of Geetu Mohandas’ ‘Trojan-Horse filmmaking’: where a story commits entirely to the grammar of the masses to craft a message of the classes. It employs all the aesthetics and beats of the male gaze throughout in order to arrive at the one thing the previous movies lack: the consequences of this gaze. The erosure of redemption. The home where the chickens come to roost. The reaping of all that is sown in the name of flawed heroes.
As in life, the troubled men of such movies seldom get what they deserve, but it’s mostly because the makers cannot distinguish between endorsement and social conditioning. Raya’s reckoning happens at this volume too: a surreally snowy landscape, a dizzying smorgasbord of bullets and madness. One can argue that this is the fate of Trojan Horse storytelling. But it’s also a sobering sign of how the most subversive mainstream projects cannot afford to stray away from the formula it critiques; they often run the risk of alienating the very eyeballs they strive to scold. It’s the equivalent of watching a serial killer confess that they were a vigilante all along. The mask is necessary, even though there’s the threat of the disguise becoming the movie itself. It’s quite the rug-pulling moment, especially because Toxic pretends so hard and for so long that you wonder if the release is worth the difficult viewing experience.
Perhaps we’ve reached a stage where creative conformism is the most effective form of dissent; compliance is merely a medium to stage the gambit. The only way to rap the knuckles of a culture that romanticises misogyny (or faith) is to first massage the hand. It’s to get their attention; ironically, this goes too far to do that. The problem is how deep — and self-defeating — the subterfuge tends to be. It’s not an easy pill to swallow for viewers who may be wired to use Vanga-sized yardsticks to judge the entertainment of Toxic. Will I watch it again? Probably not. Does it ultimately ask too much of the average watcher? For sure. But it’s hard to dismiss the courage of a movie that’s prepared to lose itself in a quest to find its voice. It’s impossible not to admire the psychology of a film that’s willing to be bad in its quest to weaponise its goodness.
There are visuals towards the end that shoot ambitious arthouse arrows with mainstream bows. Some of the imagery is fascinating, merging the toll of toxicity with the mentality of mayhem. In other words, you can question the manner of journey, but the destination is beyond doubt. When The New Yorker critic Richard Brody picked up the Ebert quote, he had no qualms calling it out and saying that, contrary to popular discourse, a director’s vision is actually central to criticism: “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 who walk out of a hall wondering if smoking is essential for boldness or injurious to health. Ask the people who exit Toxic wondering if they saw female rage and retribution camouflaged as a distinctly male tragedy.