Why Toxic's 'Ladies & Ladies' Trailer Has Sparked A Necessary Conversation About Power, Desire And Women In Mass Cinema
“Men and their cocks.”
The line lands in the ‘Toxic’ promotional trailer as a deliberate rupture in tone, a moment that immediately unsettles the viewer and reframes everything that follows. It is abrasive, confrontational, and designed to be remembered.
Whether it functions as a critique, a characterisation, or a shock tactic is precisely what the trailer refuses to clarify.
That refusal, in many ways, defines the current discourse around Geetu Mohandas’ ambitious gangster drama.
The Ladies & Ladies trailer does not behave like conventional promotional material.
The trailer effectively announces that this world is not intended for children.
It almost functions as a cultural warning that parents should keep children away, and even adults are being invited into a morally uncomfortable universe at their own discretion.
It also does not establish narrative coherence or emotional grounding in any traditional sense; it constructs a fragmented cinematic space in which style overtakes exposition and character introduction is prioritised over storytelling clarity.
The warning prepares audiences for violence, sexuality and emotional darkness before a single frame of the narrative unfolds.
Whether that confidence ultimately works in the film’s favour remains to be seen.
What emerges is less a preview of a plot and more a curated mood of moral instability, gendered tension, and visual excess.
Within this framework, the women occupy an unusually assertive position.
Unlike many commercial action films where female characters primarily exist to support the hero’s emotional arc, these women seem positioned as forces capable of altering the narrative itself.
Nayanthara’s presence is defined through mobility and control rather than relational context. Tara Sutaria is framed within a stylised gangster iconography.
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Kiara Advani’s character is withheld almost entirely in terms of narrative clarity, instead constructed through aura and ambiguity. Huma Qureshi and Rukmini Vasanth, though briefly present, register through tonal weight rather than screen time.
There is a clear intention here that these are not decorative presences positioned around a male centre. They are, at least in framing, participants in the architecture of violence and power that the trailer constructs.
Yet it is precisely here that the film opens itself to interpretive tension.
The question is not whether women are visible in Toxic. They are.
The question is what kind of visibility is being offered, and whether that visibility translates into narrative agency or remains confined to aesthetic assertion. The trailer does not resolve this ambiguity. It instead sustains it, allowing competing readings to coexist without privileging one over another.
This ambiguity becomes more pronounced in the trailer’s handling of sexuality and aggression. Several sequences lean into stylised sensuality, framed through lighting, costume, and gesture that evoke both glamour and discomfort.
People who read these images as exploitative are responding to a long cinematic history in which female bodies have been aestheticised within male-coded visual regimes.
At the same time, such imagery deliberately stages discomfort as a thematic strategy, embedding sexuality within a world where power itself is unstable and transactional.
The absence of narrative context prevents either reading from settling conclusively.
The same applies to the dialogue that has now become emblematic of the trailer’s controversy. Is it an expression of misogyny, a reflection of character worldview, or a broader critique of masculine excess?
In isolation, it is all of these possibilities at once, and none definitively.
A misogynistic character speaking misogynistic dialogue does not necessarily make a film misogynistic.
Similarly, a woman using confrontational language against patriarchal men does not automatically become misandry.
Context changes everything.
Unfortunately, a trailer offers fragments—not explanations. That makes definitive judgments premature.
Geetu Mohandas is not an inexperienced commercial filmmaker attempting glamour for glamour’s sake.
Her previous work demonstrates an interest in psychological complexity, moral discomfort and flawed human beings.
It is therefore equally plausible that the trailer intentionally weaponises sexual imagery to make audiences uncomfortable before interrogating why such imagery exists within violent criminal worlds.
Some of cinema’s strongest feminist works feature deeply sexist men, exploitative environments and disturbing violence against women—not because the films celebrate those realities, but because they examine them critically.
If Geetu Mohandas is portraying misogynistic men only to expose, dismantle or punish them, then the controversial dialogue and uncomfortable imagery could acquire entirely different meanings within the completed narrative.
Likewise, if the women are ultimately driving the story toward revenge, justice or survival, today’s criticisms may look very different after release.
The trailer simply does not provide enough evidence to conclude either way.
Also, Yash’s presence, notably, resists the conventional grammar of star excess. There is no overt performative escalation, no insistence on domination through spectacle like the previous teaser.
Instead, his role in the trailer is constructed through restraint, through gaze, posture, and controlled physicality. This subdued approach allows the surrounding ensemble, particularly the women, to occupy visual and tonal space without being immediately subsumed under a singular heroic centre.
Whether this balance persists in the final film remains unknown. But within the trailer, it is carefully maintained.
The broader visual design reinforces this tonal ambiguity. Rajeev Ravi’s cinematographic texture leans towards muted palettes and shadow-heavy framing, creating a world that feels neither fully grounded in realism nor entirely detached into stylisation.
It exists in an in-between register, an aesthetic choice that aligns with the film’s thematic uncertainty.
At a structural level, Toxic appears to be operating within a framework that resists binary reading.
It neither fully endorses nor fully condemns the world it depicts within the trailer. Instead, it stages that world as contested terrain, where gender, violence, and desire intersect without resolution.
This is where the current debate around feminism and representation becomes particularly complex.
The presence of strong female figures, even visually commanding ones, does not in itself settle questions of gender politics.
Nor does the inclusion of provocative language or sexualised imagery automatically confirm misogynistic intent. The distinction lies in narrative consequence, something the trailer, by design, does not provide.
As a result, critical interpretation is forced to remain provisional.
What can be stated with confidence is that Toxic has constructed a promotional text that actively resists passive consumption. It does not guide interpretation; it provokes it. It does not clarify meaning; it disperses it across multiple, sometimes contradictory readings.
In doing so, it has ensured attention not only on Yash as a star, but on the larger question of what kind of cinema this is attempting to become.
