Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-ups

What might happen when a woman filmmaker gets the opportunity to make a film about violence and sex? What might happen when she gets access to all the familiar toys of the male-star vehicle: the punch dialogues, the star, the swagger, the slow-motion sequences, the sex, the violence… What might she bring to this cinema that we don’t generally get? As it turns out… quite a lot. First, she refuses to see the protagonist, Raya, as a ‘hero’. Quite the opposite, in fact. The film isn’t interested in hero-villain demarcations, right-wrong judgments. Raya (Yash) himself says as much at one point. When you are in pain, morality stops seeming important. The film, in fact, has a lot to say about the nature of pain, about what happens when you live with it for so long that you begin to fall in love with it, when it begins to feel more like home than any real home ever could, ever did. There’s a fantastic song in the Tamil version, ‘Vittupogaadha Yen Vali’, that speaks of this dichotomy. “Vittupoiduma en vali, poi vidaadhe en vali…”

Three years after Yash and Geetu Mohandas announced Toxic, the film is finally in theatres. And after all the waiting, the anticipation and the speculation, one question remains stubbornly unanswered: where is the female gaze Geetu promised? In a throwback interview, Geetu described Toxic as a “gangster film”. She said, “It’s a gangster genre with a female gaze. How about that?” When the teaser dropped in July, that was the question everyone asked. Now, after three hours of Toxic, a more pointed one takes its place: does the film ever really see its women at all? Rewind to 2023. When Yash and Geetu Mohandas announced their collaboration, eyebrows went up. Here was a star coming off the monumental success of the KGF franchise, joining forces with a filmmaker known for her distinct, uncompromising voice. Would these two very different cinematic worlds click, or would the pairing end up a spectacular miss? There seemed to be little room for anything in between.

“Violence is my mother tongue, the universal language.” Indeed, this dialogue delivered by Kannada ‘rockstar’ Yash with the panache it deserves says it all. ‘Toxic’, as the name suggests, is about repressed emotions, which in their own convoluted way define toxic masculinity. Before we arrive at this emotion-charged and relevant conclusion, there is a set violence piece in this gangster drama every 10 minutes. The film moves at breakneck speed, leaving you no room to breathe — and often not in a good way. Just when you recover from the onslaught of the piling body count, yet another dance of death unfurls. Who is killing whom is not as important; half the time you don’t know either, as the symphony of violence unspools right through the film.

Maybe, it’s not a compliment to start out comparing a film to Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s works. I can imagine how Toxic might have been pitched as something that ‘subverts’ Vanga, which is not quite the case. My most guttural response to it was, a Vanga film if it learned therapy-speak. This might be a reductive and over-simplistic response, but having mulled over it, this comes closest to my purest reaction to this (knowingly) campy, indulgent, loud, sweeping film, which has something most cash cows drop at the first slight inconvenience: a clear conscience. It has all ingredients that we’ve come to associate with pan-India blockbusters from the last decade – multi-ethnicity actors, cramped world-building, gargantuan action set-pieces, dialogues delivered like ad catchphrases, racy sex scenes featuring multiple women, and a three-act structure for key sequences – which means we’re subjected to the “hero’s entry” a dozen times.

“So you think I’m a bad guy? No, I think you’re toxic.” This exchange comes at a point in the film by which time it’s been clearly established that Raya (Yash) is the kind of Alpha male who thinks blood spatters are the best accessories ever, especially when they spurt from freshly torn and broken limbs. So is that even a question? No, it’s entirely rhetorical. It’s exactly the thing that defines this post-Independence gangster saga, all 3 hours 15 minutes of it, for an audience primed for as much gore as the leading man can dish out, especially when he’s seen how it got lapped up in his previous mammoth hits (KGF 1 and 2).

Toxic is 3 hrs 14 mins long.If you remove all the shots of the lead played by Yash walking around in slow motion - you’re down to about 2 hours 30 minutes. Remove all the shots of Yash smoking a cigar/cigarette - around 2 hours. Remove the violent fights involving axes, guns, knives, grenades, chainsaws and what appears to be the entire inventory of a hardware store — and you’re left with roughly 60 minutes. Which, frankly, would have been the perfect length, because the entire film is summarised in the last 20 minutes anyway.

“This isn’t an Amar Chitra Katha fairytale” says Rocking Star Yash in the introduction to his first film since KGF: Chapter 2, the movie that turned his fortunes around by giving him pan-India popularity. It’s another thing that by the end of three hours and 15 minutes of crass dialogues, gory violence and over-the-top shenanigans in Toxic, one yearns for a simple Amar Chitra Katha tale. Action and swagger are key attributes of Yash’s screen persona. In Toxic, though, there’s overreliance on the combo to such an extent that the story seems to have been forgotten altogether. Like the KGF films, here too it’s hard to keep pace with what is happening, where it is unfolding and even who is who after a point.