Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups arrives with one of the most interesting combinations of superstar Yash, an enormous commercial canvas, and filmmaker Geetu Mohandas, whose earlier films have been defined by rawness, uncomfortable human emotions and unconventional storytelling.

That naturally creates an expectation that the film will be more than a conventional gangster spectacle.

Unfortunately, Toxic feels like a film caught between wanting to be a stylish, larger-than-life action drama and wanting to say something about trauma, masculinity, guilt and human relationships.

There are flashes of that ambition, but the writing rarely gives those ideas the depth they deserve. What remains is a visually striking but exhausting film that mistakes excess for emotional weight.

Spoiler Alert:

The film opens with a circus company and a disturbing narration that immediately establishes that this is a story meant for grown-ups.

We are introduced to Kiara Advani’s Nadia, a circus performer, and her son, before the film moves into a darker world involving her husband and the violent circumstances surrounding the circus.

From there, Toxic takes us to Goa, where the world of Raya gradually unfolds. Yash’s introduction is designed entirely as a mass moment: the car sequence, the swagger, the violence and eventually the now-famous “Daddy is home” dialogue.

The film wastes little time establishing Raya as a man who exists in a world of crime, power, sex and violence.

Raya is eventually revealed to be deeply connected to Ganga, played by Nayanthara, with their traumatic childhood forming an important part of the story.

Their mother had a destructive relationship with their father, and Raya’s violent past is closely tied to what happened within the family.

The story then moves through the world of the opium trade, criminal networks and power struggles, while gradually introducing Nadia into Raya’s world.

The film clearly wants to construct a larger emotional story underneath all that violence. At its heart, there is an attempt to explore the bond between a brother and sister, the consequences of childhood trauma, and the emotional baggage Raya carries as a man.

The latter part of the film introduces the relationship between Raya and his son, which eventually becomes much more complicated.

That idea is actually one of the more interesting things in Toxic. A man who has spent his entire life projecting power and violence is eventually haunted by something he cannot control: his own guilt. But the film reaches this emotional point after spending so much time on spectacle that the emotion never lands as strongly as it should.

And this is where my biggest problem with Toxic begins,

The film repeatedly tells us that Raya is toxic, but it also repeatedly makes his toxicity look cool. His violence, his misogynistic dialogues, his sexual relationships and his aggression are presented with so much style and elevation that the film often seems fascinated by the very behaviour it supposedly wants us to question.

One particular sequence involving Rukmini Vasanth captures this contradiction perfectly. When her character tells Raya that an animal also has a mind and kindness, this scene somehow adds another layer of toxic glorification and another moment where his dangerousness becomes something dramatic and fascinating.

The film keeps returning to the idea that beneath this violent man is a wounded, traumatised human being, and that becomes a kind of emotional justification for his behaviour.

The problem is not that a film cannot portray a toxic or misogynistic man. Of course it can. The problem is how the film frames him. When almost every aggressive action gets a mass elevation, when misogynistic lines are delivered like punchlines and when his pain becomes the emotional explanation for his behaviour, the film starts walking dangerously close to glorifying the very toxicity it names.

And the imbalance becomes more visible when you look at the women around Raya. Their lives are filled with consequences, guilt, trauma and regret, while Raya continues to exist in a world of power, sex, violence and heroism.

This is particularly disappointing because of Geetu Mohandas.

Geetu has already made films such as Liar’s Dice and Moothon, films that were interested in people on the margins, complicated emotions and uncomfortable realities.

Liar’s Dice won two National Film Awards and was India’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars.

So when a filmmaker with that kind of sensibility enters a gigantic commercial space, the expectation is not that she should abandon commercial cinema.

The exciting possibility was that she would blend her rawness and understanding of reality with the scale, spectacle and mass language of a Yash film.

But that fusion doesn’t really happen in Toxic. The commercial language overwhelms the filmmaker’s individual voice.

Instead of finding something fresh inside the gangster template, the film often falls back on familiar ideas of the powerful, damaged and hyper-masculine male hero.

Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography is one of its strongest elements. The film has an enormous visual canvas, with dark textures, elaborate production design and carefully constructed frames that give the gangster world a distinctive atmosphere.

The costumes also contribute significantly to the film’s aesthetic. There is a clear attempt to create a stylised period world rather than simply reproduce a conventional gangster setting.

The music also adds to the film’s scale. Vishal Mishra’s contribution brings some of the emotional and melodic texture that the screenplay itself sometimes struggles to create.

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The overall soundscape works particularly well during the larger sequences, even if the repeated elevation of violence eventually becomes exhausting.

Kiara Advani is one of the film’s strongest performers. Nadia could easily have become another ornamental character in a film dominated by Raya, but Kiara gives her vulnerability and emotional weight.

Her performance works especially well in the quieter portions, where the film allows the character’s pain to come through rather than simply using her as part of the visual spectacle.

And then there is the runtime.

At more than three hours, Toxic desperately needed a tighter screenplay. The film repeatedly moves from sex to violence, violence to another dramatic exchange, then another action sequence, and then another emotional revelation. The repetition becomes tiring.

Long films can work when there is enough emotional or narrative movement. Here, the problem is that large portions feel like they are circling the same ideas without developing them enough. By the time the climax arrives, the runtime becomes impossible to ignore.

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Toxic is therefore a strange film to review because there is clearly something ambitious buried inside it. It wants to talk about trauma. It wants to talk about the emotional damage carried by men. It wants to explore the bond between siblings. It wants to show how violence shapes families. It even wants to question the toxicity of its own protagonist.

But somewhere along the way, the film becomes too fascinated with the spectacle of that toxicity.

Timeline Verdict: Visually ambitious, but emotionally hollow and unnecessarily long.

Rating: 2/5

Cast: Yash, Kiara Advani, Nayanthara, Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria, Rukmini Vasanth

Crew:

Director: Geetu Mohandas
Writers: Geetu Mohandas, Yash
Producer: Venkat K. Narayana, Yash
Cinematography: Rajeev Ravi
Editing: Ujwal Kulkarni
Music: Vishal Mishra