Yash is back, and Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-ups is clearly not interested in making a quiet comeback. Directed by Geethu Mohandas, the period action drama drops him into a dark, strange and very stylish gangster world set in Goa around 1947, when the region was still under Portuguese rule and the opium trade was thriving. After the enormous success of the K.G.F films, expectations around Yash’s next movie were always going to be a little ridiculous, and Toxic knows it. It goes big on everything — production design, action, music, violence and, of course, Yash himself. But underneath all that noise, the film is also trying to tell a story about family, betrayal and people who make terrible choices and then have to live with them.
A Gangster Story With a Messy Family at Its Center
The story follows Raya, an orphan who grows up alongside his fiercely protective sister Gauri and eventually finds his way into Goa’s criminal underworld. He isn’t born into power, so he has to fight, manipulate and make alliances to get there. One of those alliances comes through his marriage to Rebecca, the daughter of his boss Salvador. On paper, it gives Raya a stronger position in the syndicate, but naturally, things don’t stay that simple. His relationship with Nadia, a circus performer, throws everything off balance and sets off a chain of betrayals, personal conflicts and gang warfare. What starts as a story about a man building an empire slowly turns into a story about how that empire, and the people around him, begin falling apart. That’s where Toxic is more interesting than its gangster setup initially suggests.
Yash Knows Exactly What Kind of Star He Is
Yash doesn’t exactly disappear into Raya, but that’s not really the point. He walks into the film with the kind of screen presence that the movie has clearly been designed around, and whenever he appears, the camera knows where it needs to be looking. Raya is ruthless and unpredictable, but there are flashes of regret and vulnerability underneath the swagger, and Yash handles those quieter moments better than expected. The film also gives him a double-role angle, which allows him to play around with different shades of the character. Some of the action is obviously made for the big screen — the kind where you can almost hear the theatre audience reacting before the scene has even finished — but Yash is also quite good when the film slows down and simply lets him look at somebody without immediately punching them.
The women around him are not just there to decorate the gangster world either, which is one of the film’s better decisions. Nayanthara gets a strong role as Gauri and brings a controlled intensity to the character. She doesn’t need to shout to make an impression, and some of her quieter scenes land surprisingly well. Kiara Advani’s Nadia is more glamorous and emotionally exposed, but she gets enough material to make the relationship with Raya feel important to the larger story. Huma Qureshi has fun with a darker role, while Tara Sutaria and Rukmini Vasanth are good in their parts, even if the screenplay doesn’t give them quite as much room as you’d hope.
The Film Looks Expensive. Very Expensive.
Technically, Toxic is hard to fault. Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography gives the movie a grimy, old-world look while still allowing it to have the polished scale of a modern big-budget action film. Goa is presented less like a postcard and more like a dangerous little world full of smoke, shadows, crowded streets and people who always seem to be hiding something. There is a lot going on in the frame, sometimes almost too much, but the visual identity is unmistakable. Ravi Basrur’s music does what Ravi Basrur music tends to do — it gets very loud when the hero needs to feel like a larger-than-life figure, and some of those elevation moments will probably work much better in a packed theatre than they do on a television screen at home.
Geethu Mohandas also deserves credit for trying something different with the gangster genre. There is clearly an art-house influence running underneath all the bloodshed and big action sequences, and the women in Raya’s life are given an importance that you don’t usually see in this kind of star vehicle. The problem is that the movie sometimes seems unsure which version of itself it wants to be. The first half is patient, atmospheric and interested in the characters, eventually building toward a strong interval turn. Then the second half starts throwing violence, action and spectacle at you with increasing frequency. It isn’t necessarily boring, but it does start feeling like the film has forgotten some of the things it spent so much time setting up.
When the Ambition Starts Getting in the Way
This is probably where Toxic becomes frustrating. There is a genuinely interesting movie buried inside all the spectacle. The idea of taking the usual hyper-masculine gangster hero and surrounding him with women who aren’t simply waiting around for him to save them is a good one. Raya’s downfall isn’t just about rival gangsters or some bigger criminal threat. His relationships and the choices he makes inside those relationships are a major part of his undoing. That gives the movie a slightly twisted fairy-tale quality, which fits the title better than you might initially expect.
But then the film keeps getting pulled back toward the familiar commercial template. More violence. Bigger action. Another hero moment. Another stretch designed to make the audience go, “Okay, that was crazy.” Some of it is entertaining, absolutely, but eventually the emotional material starts getting buried underneath it. With a runtime of more than three hours, Toxic really could have used a sharper edit. There are scenes that feel like they should have been shortened, others that could probably have been removed altogether, and a few moments where you can almost sense the movie struggling to get itself back on track.
Final Verdict
Toxic is not a perfect film, and it doesn’t come particularly close. The second half is too long, the pacing becomes uneven and the story occasionally sacrifices its more interesting character ideas just to get to the next big action sequence. Still, dismissing it as another routine pan-Indian gangster film would be unfair. There is considerably more going on here, even if the movie doesn’t always know how to balance all of it.
What stays with you is the combination of Yash’s star power, the unusual female characters, the grim period setting and Geethu Mohandas’ willingness to make something that feels a little strange. It can be excessive, sometimes very excessive, but there is a personality to Toxic that many big commercial films don’t have. The movie wants to be a gangster epic, a family tragedy, a violent fairy tale and a star vehicle all at once. It doesn’t completely pull that off, but the ambition is hard to miss.
And honestly, that may be the most interesting thing about Toxic. It isn’t always successful, but it is rarely timid. Yash gets his giant-screen moments, the film looks spectacular, and underneath all the blood and noise there is a story about a man whose greatest weakness isn’t necessarily his enemies. It is the people he loves, the people he trusts and the choices he keeps making around them.