Toxic: A Technical Triumph Weighed Down by Its Own Screenplay

From the moment it was announced, Toxic carried a weight of expectation that few Indian films have had to shoulder. Much of that came from the director. Geetu Mohandas had already earned a reputation for daring, singular cinema with Liar's Dice and, more memorably, Moothon, films that stood well apart from the usual output and drew serious critical praise. Placing Yash at the centre of that sensibility felt like a genuine event. After the enormous success of KGF, he had the momentum and the freedom to take a real creative risk, and pairing him with a filmmaker like Mohandas suggested we were about to witness something bold and experimental on a large canvas.

What followed has split audiences almost down the middle. The response on social media has been oddly binary. The film is either a one or a ten, with very little sitting in between, and that alone tells you something about the kind of reaction it provokes. The box office is a separate conversation, and not one I am especially interested in, though it is hard to ignore entirely.

The foundation of the film is genuinely strong. The world it builds is deep, layered and thoughtfully conceived. I am not talking about what finally reaches the screen, but about the raw material, the characters and the story as they exist on paper. As someone who watches a lot of cinema, I could see the shape of something exceptional here. The characters are well positioned and the premise holds every ingredient it needed to become one of the finest films of recent years. The problem, and it is the central one, is that the characters are never given proper arcs. The writing does not do them justice, and for a film of this scale that is close to unforgivable.

That weakness shows itself from the opening stretch. The film begins at a sprint, cutting rapidly from scene to scene, place to place, face to face. The transitions come so fast that the context never has room to settle. There is very little detailing in how each situation is set up, so the characters begin to blur into one another. You lose track of who matters and why. The intensity a figure is meant to carry, or the backstory that should anchor them, is left stranded and never really lands.

The other thing that pulled me out of the film was the dialogue, particularly from the lead. A good deal of it felt off, and several lines arrive out of nowhere with no real reason to be in the script. For a film reaching toward something serious, those moments break the spell.

Toxic is also filled with strong female presences. Nayanthara, Huma Qureshi, Kiara Advani and Tara Sutaria form the core, and Rukmini Vasanth adds a fifth. On paper, every one of them had the chance to leave a lasting mark. In practice, the same failure of writing holds them back. The characterisation simply is not there, and so none of them make the impression the film so clearly wanted them to make.

At its heart, Toxic is a story of moral conflict, both between the central character and the world around him and within the man himself. It is about the pull between power and love, about relationships and belonging, about family and the guilt that trails behind every choice. That inner battle is the real engine of the film, and in isolated moments it is rendered beautifully. The trouble is that the team could never bind these moments into a coherent whole, and that failure reaches the audience directly. People walked out of the theatre with a question mark hanging over them, not out of curiosity but out of a mix of shock, surprise and plain dissatisfaction. What did I just watch, and not in the good way.

None of this means the film is a lost cause. There are real reasons to admire it, just as there are reasons to criticise it sharply, and the sharpness comes precisely because the team held all the right cards. The production value is enormous. The cast is remarkable. The technical craft, from the cinematography to the music, is handled with care. And Yash himself has clearly poured everything he had into this character. That effort may not be rewarded straight away, but I have a feeling that if a director's cut ever surfaces, this film could drift into cult territory. Without it, I suspect many will simply forget it.

If there is one thing that lifts Toxic, it is the performances, and Yash leads from the front. This is, without exaggeration, his finest work to date. It is more layered and more versatile than anything in the KGF films or his earlier roles, and we are watching a different actor here. The direction, by contrast, carries clear mistakes, and a few of them tip certain stretches close to a mess. Yet technically the film is rich in a way that is genuinely rare for Indian cinema. The colour grading, the sound design, the overall look, the production design, all of it feels closer to international and Hollywood standards than to the norms we are used to. That was, for me, one of the biggest takeaways.

And that is exactly where the disappointment bites. As someone who came in with real hope because of the people involved, it is painful to watch a story of this potential handled so carelessly. The raw idea deserved rigour and attention. What it received often feels lazy, and that gap between promise and execution leaves you with a strange, contradictory sense of what cinema is even meant to be.

On a more personal note, the action is well choreographed, but there is far too much of it. The gunfire never stops. You settle into a scene, and roughly every twenty minutes another gun battle erupts. After a while it stops feeling real. That constant rhythm of shootouts wears the film down. Had that same energy been turned toward the characters and the world around them, Toxic would have been a far better film.

There is also the matter of the title and the themes it points to. I usually have little patience for films that lean on misogyny or toxic masculinity, unless there is a genuine reason for it and the writing earns that choice. Toxic contains all of these elements. The masculinity is toxic, the misogyny is present, and the film itself, by design, is toxic. The title is not accidental, and there is a real justification buried inside the concept. The failure, once again, is that Mohandas never manages to write that justification clearly onto the screen for the audience to actually feel.

In the end, Toxic is a film of what ifs. Even for me, the whole experience became one long what if. What if this material had been treated with the care it deserved. What if the world had been allowed to breathe. What if the writing had risen to meet the craft. The sadness is that it never did, because at the final reckoning the art was set aside in favour of the commercial machine.

Whatever else it is, Toxic will be talked about, either for its flaws or for the potential it wasted, and it should not be forgotten. It is a serious effort, technically it stands well ahead of the typical Indian film, and the only thing truly holding it back is the poor treatment of its own story.