Before 'Toxic': Why Geetu Mohandas’ New Film Is Being Watched Beyond Yash’s Stardom
There is a reason Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups feels like a particularly interesting film to watch before its release.
We know it is a huge commercial project led by Yash, with Nayanthara, Kiara Advani, Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria and Rukmini Vasanth in the cast.
But behind all that scale is Geetu Mohandas, a filmmaker whose earlier work has rarely followed the comfortable route.
Geethu Mohandas began acting as a child and later established herself as a filmmaker with Kelkkunnundo, Liar’s Dice and Moothon.
Liar’s Dice won two National Film Awards, travelled to Sundance and became India’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 87th Academy Awards.
Moothon, meanwhile, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and further established her reputation as a filmmaker with a distinctive voice.
That makes Toxic an unusual career move. She is stepping from intimate, socially grounded cinema into a large-scale gangster action film starring one of Indian cinema’s biggest stars.
The film is written by Yash and Geetu Mohandas and produced by Venkat K Narayana and Yash. Rajeev Ravi is the cinematographer, Ravi Basrur handles the music, and Ujwal Kulkarni is the editor.
The official trailer, released ahead of the August 26 theatrical release, promised a dark period gangster drama set against Goa’s turbulent pre-liberation years.
Yash appears in a powerful dual role, while the film brings together an unusually large female ensemble.
But the trailer also created a completely different conversation.
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Vviewers began questioning the way its women were presented.
Some reactions described the women as sexualised, ornamental or secondary to the male protagonist. The criticism became strong enough for Yash to publicly defend the film, saying that the trailer does not represent the complete story and that there is a voice for women within the film.
That response makes the eventual film particularly important to assess.
After all, the director is Geetu Mohandas, a filmmaker whose body of work has been deeply attentive to people pushed to the margins. It is fair, therefore, to ask what she has done with a commercial canvas this large.
The makers have themselves tried to address the conversation around the female characters. The Ladies & Ladies promotional video specifically presented the women of Toxic as powerful figures within its dark world.
The most intriguing question surrounding Toxic is not whether Geetu Mohandas can make a big film. The trailer has already shown that she can handle scale, spectacle and a star-driven world.
The real question is whether she has managed to retain the sharpness that made Liar’s Dice and Moothon distinctive.
That is where Toxic becomes more than another Yash action film.
It is a test of what happens when an independent filmmaker with a strong social and feminist sensibility enters the machinery of mainstream cinema.
The film releases worldwide on August 26, 2026, with an A certificate and a reported runtime of around 3 hours 14 minutes.
For Geetu Mohandas, Toxic is not simply the biggest film of her career. It is perhaps the most closely watched one.
And after the questions raised by its trailer, the audience is no longer going in merely to see what Yash does next.
They are also waiting to see what Geetu Mohandas has done with the women in his world.
