'Toxic' Review: This Fairytale Is a Trojan Horse for Toxic Masculinity

It's a film that appears to celebrate toxic masculinity on the surface, only to lure you to expose its rotten core.

Yash in a still from 'Toxic'.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Toxic has a lot of sex. Sex in the backseat of a car. Sex on the beach. Sex in the back of a graveyard. Sex on a broken Ferris wheel. It seems that the film is deliberately designed to seduce the average Indian male—one who loves watching giant men shoot people, blow things up and have affairs with multiple women, so he can feel masculine and live vicariously through the man on screen.

As this Indian male goes back home, he lives a life crumbling under the suffocating insecurities and expectations of masculinity that he can never quite live up to.

A Trojan Horse for Toxic Masculinity

Director Geetu Mohandas is on a mission here. In Toxic, she creates the perfect male fantasy: a man who sleeps around with women to quench his “hawas”—the word for “lust” used in the Hindi dub of the film. For much of the film, it almost feels as though Toxic is celebrating this... toxicity.

But towards the end, Mohandas reveals just how disgusting and grotesque this brand of masculinity really is: how it destroys everything it touches and leaves behind a trail of damage that stretches across generations.

This is where Mohandas's larger mission comes into focus. She seduces the average Indian male by selling him the fantasy of a violent, lustful, emotionally absent, deadbeat father. She glamorises him with familiar masculine tropes, lavish production design and larger-than-life imagery, allowing the fantasy to feel intoxicating before exposing the ugliness lurking underneath.

It is Trojan Horse cinema at its finest: a film that appears to celebrate toxic masculinity on the surface, only to lure you close enough to expose its rotten core.

One Man’s Lust, Generations of Ruin

Yash plays Raya, a ruthless man with a traumatic childhood who is all set to make his foray into Goa’s opium syndicate. The year is 1947, and despite being independent, the Goan union territory is under a tight grip of the Portuguese. Nayanthara is Ganga, Raya’s sister who is, at times, a paragon of virtue and self-sacrifice, at others, utterly ruthless and capable of murder. Huma Qureshi is Elizabeth, Salvador’s lover who runs the syndicate in his absence. Raya is betrothed to Rebecca—played to perfection by an affecting Tara Sutaria—the daughter of Opium kingpin Salvador as a last-ditch measure to save a business deal.

The two, however, genuinely love each other. Enter Nadia—played with an unhinged brilliance by Kiara Advani—the popular circus performer who Raya falls in love with, sabotaging his relationship with Salvador.

Huma Qureshi in a still from 'Toxic'.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

In this fairytale, Raya and Nadia’s affair is just the forbidden love that destroyed kingdoms and brought ruin to generations. Rightfully so, Nadia bears Raya’s child, an event that triggers a chain of catastrophic events, difficult to describe in their impact but strong enough to be felt by generations to come.

Rebecca is distraught—she is now an alcoholic who drinks to numb her pain. Despite being saddled with lesser material in the past, Sutaria proves her mettle here, communicating the character’s grief with an affecting, deeply felt performance.

Kiara Advani as a circus performer is truly brilliant. As Nadia, she pushes back against Yash’s dominating ways and tries to exert as much agency as she can without getting herself hurt in the process.

The Women in Raya’s Crossfire

The madness in Nadia’s eyes, mascara streaking down her face, coupled with a smile that seems to conceal a thousand tears, captures the grief of a woman caught in the crossfire, forced to pay the devastating price for a man’s misplaced priorities.

After a bloody shootout, Raya all but abandons his own son and the mother of his child. While Rebecca and Nadia are women whose lives are ruined by Raya’s lust, Ganga sacrifices herself for Raya, a sister so perfect she becomes a martyr to keep his legacy alive.

Nayanthara practices just the right amount of restraint to make this performance convincing. Huma Qureshi, meanwhile, is given a role that isn’t as meaty, but she is just as ruthless in scenes where her character is pushed to the brink, wielding her fury with a cold, unflinching intensity.

Kiara Advani in a still from 'Toxic'.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

A Man Haunted by His Own Destruction

Yash, the Kannada actor referred to as the ‘Rocking Star’, is rocking his majestic beard in most of the scenes. As already revealed in the trailer, he also sports a relatively clean look in a dual role, where he plays his own son.

In the second half, the action moves from Goa to Macau, where Raya enters the casino business. There, he meets yet another woman whose life he nearly ruins: Mellisa, played by Rukmini Vasanth. He impregnates her, having yet another child (birth control, anyone?), and traumatises the child because he cannot keep him safe from his own madness.

Without spoiling the ending, let this critic tell you: the plot twist will have you in an absolute chokehold.

While the first half of the film takes its own sweet time with world-building, the final 20 minutes deliver an emotional payoff worthy of all the patience the film initially demands of you. In what can only be called a breathtaking, surreal sequence, we see the broken Ferris wheel—where Raya and Nadia once romanced each other—collapse into the vast sea as Raya has a vision of Nadia, now dead, riding the gallopers.

When Fairytale Turns Into a Nightmare

It is a gut-wrenching scene that puts into perspective just how corrosive toxic masculinity is. In another scene, we see ‘Ticket’ (Yash’s abandoned son, now all grown up) call him out for ruining the life of every woman he has ever met.

This is when the film’s gender politics becomes clear as daylight. Mohandas is not condoning but rather condemning the self-destructive tendencies of narcissistic men who cannot own up to their mistakes and are simply incapable of self-reflection.

In another majestic sequence, Ganga appears in an ethereal white pantsuit against the snow-capped mountains before dissolving into a flock of birds, her body scattering into flight.

As Raya descends into madness, he is haunted by the ghost of every woman he has ever wronged. He is haunted by the noise his son’s toy made when he died. He is haunted by guilt that consumes him entirely.

In another surreal scene, thousands of circus clowns attack Raya as a snowstorm approaches—a sequence so spectacular and genre-bending that it works not just as a visual spectacle but also as a manifestation of the chaos and guilt tormenting him psychologically.

Yash in a still from 'Toxic'.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Beneath the Sex, a Reckoning

Writers Yash and Geetu Mohandas have written dialogues that can sometimes come across as too expository and explanatory, even though they establish the film’s central themes of guilt, vengeance, and toxic masculinity fairly well. Ujwal Kulkarni’s editing is sharp. The montages move at a breakneck pace, masterfully establishing the film’s sensual, feverish energy.

Yes, Toxic has a lot of sex. But beneath all that sex is a film with plenty of soul, substance, and a surprisingly sharp understanding of gender politics.

Sex is the smokescreen, the bait that draws you into Raya’s fantasy of masculinity before the film slowly pulls the curtain back to reveal the wreckage left behind by it. In an era where hyper-masculine films about bearded men killing, murdering and bombing their way through the world have become commonplace, Toxic does something far more interesting.

The film understands the seductive power of toxic masculinity and then weaponises that seduction against itself. And that, in a cinematic landscape overflowing with masculine rage, makes all the difference.

(Deepansh Duggal is a film critic based out of New Delhi. His work has appeared in Hindustan Times, OPEN, Outlook, Frontline Magazine and The Economic Times. He has a particular interest in anti-capitalist narratives and films that lie at the intersection of power and ideology.)