Subscribe
Toxic (Kannada)
Abandonment, dysfunctional families, impossible promises, wolves in disguises, wicked witches, ill-fated princesses and princes with a saviour complex — one might argue that the traditional fairytale template is already toxic though it is warmed up like apple pie and routinely served to children. In Toxic: A Fairytale for Grown-ups, director Geetu Mohandas strips the genre of its coyness and mixes it with the baying machismo of contemporary gangster films. The result is a puzzling cocktail of cracker dialogues, arresting visuals (Rajeev Ravi), and a strange story that swings between the mechanics of mass cinema and the tantalising obscurity of offbeat films.
The plot unfolds in 1947, when India has won its freedom from the British, but Goa is still under Portuguese rule. A circus lies in ruins, a mother forces her son to confront his brutal reality, and the bullet fired from that gun follows a complicated trajectory.
Enter Raya, a gangster involved in the opium trade — he is either thrusting his gun or his pelvis and by all the evidence we’re presented, he’s equally good at both. Yash plays Raya alternating between manic energy and deadpan comedy. Lines like “Violence is my mother tongue” roll out of him every few minutes, sending the audience into a frenzy. Even that casual “Aan?” that he drops before shoving a knife up a man’s jaw is wildly entertaining. He does it with the ease of a superstar who knows that nothing he does on screen will look absurd. The advantage of this is obvious but it might well be the film’s pitfall as it dramatically shifts its film language in the second half.
Nayanthara is glacial as Ganga, Raya’s sister. She speaks in a clipped tone, rarely betraying emotions, and functions as the anchor for her reckless brother. The real show-stopper, however, is Kiara Advani as Nadia. Her luminescent beauty lends a fairytale quality to the scenes, mingling the princess archetype of innocence and purity with a luscious sensuality that makes her ‘Other Woman’ role irresistible. Tellingly, the sequence when Raya and Nadia meet features bullets flying between swirling white doves; the hyperbolic romance will bring him peace but also war.
Yash also plays Ticket, Raya’s son, who appears to be part Animal, part Joker. Here, too, there is manic energy and deadpan comedy, but the actor also brings a certain shattered vulnerability to the role. This is crucial because beneath all the glitz and glamour, Toxic aspires to be a character study. What are the consequences of Raya’s choices?
In superstar films, there are rarely any.
So, when Nadia labels Raya as “toxic” (pretty advanced for the 1940s), you expect that there will be a subversion at some point, especially with its bevy of female stars. That does happen but it is so cerebral that I’m not sure it does enough to make the audience rethink their understanding, Yash’s performance notwithstanding.
When the toxicity offers so many concrete pay-offs, the subversion also has to do that to dilute its impact. Instead, the unravelling, set in a snowy fairyland with a montage of abstract visuals, does not have the same power over the audience. The clowns in the avalanche, the car underwater, the doves again, Ganga…they add up to something, but they do not demolish the mantle of the hero that Raya wears.
The scale of the setup, with its snazzy music (Ravi Basrur), blackout cut editing and innumerable instances of Raya’s hypermasculinity, is simply too big and memorable for it to be undercut by the rushed writing of the second half.
Rukmini Vasanth’s Mellisa, for instance, could have posed a real challenge to Raya’s understanding of himself but her character arc is disappointingly predictable and only ends up slackening the pace.
At over three hours, the repetitive sequences become exhausting and Raya’s internal journey is neither convincing nor effective as far as the film’s messaging is concerned. The shift in film language and genre happens too quickly, and without sound writing to back it, the audience is likely to be left wondering what just happened (such as the gentleman next to me who was incessantly whistling in the first half).
Toxic is certainly an interesting experiment, and it takes a braveheart to venture into territory such as this. Does it succeed or explode on the face? I wish I could give an unambiguous answer.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.
