Toxic review: a fairy tale in pieces

Toxic begins in 1947 and runs for 194 minutes, and somewhere along the way both numbers start feeling historical. Geetu Mohandas’s fairy tale for grown-ups wants to be a sprawling saga of power and broken men in Portuguese-ruled Goa. What it delivers, scene by scene, is a machine for making Yash look magnificent.

The bones are sturdy enough. Raya (Yash) and his protective elder sister Ganga (Nayanthara) claw their way into the empire of Salvador (Darrell D’Silva), while women orbit Raya at various distances: Rebecca (Tara Sutaria), the match he is assigned; Nadia (Kiara Advani), the circus performer he actually wants; Elizabeth (Huma Qureshi), who wants him buried. Underneath it all sits a father-son wound the film considers its beating heart.

The problem is that Toxic refuses to sit still long enough for any of it to register. Whenever the film needs tension, another head comes off. When it needs emotion, it reaches for a romance or a childhood flashback. Ujwal Kulkarni’s editing chops scenes into fragments and lurches onward before the last beat has landed, while Ravi Basrur’s score hammers away underneath, allergic to silence. You leave with pieces of four different films and the emotional residue of none.

The mirror gets it: two Yashes, and a film that cannot decide between them.

Mostly, though, Toxic is in the business of farming Yash’s aura. Every entrance, punchline and slow-motion turn is engineered for the whistle, from the increasingly baroque ways of lighting a cigarette to dialogue that arrives pre-loaded for applause. Raya isn’t really a character. He is a delivery system for swagger, and three-plus hours is a long time to watch a delivery system. It doesn’t help that the film keeps gesturing at the rot inside him, the shame and the damage, then stages his cruelty like something to cheer for.

And yet stretches of Toxic are genuinely well made. Rajeev Ravi’s smoky, textured frames are often gorgeous, the production design feels lived-in, and one long ambush at Nadia’s circus has a clarity and nastiness the other fights never find. Yash commits completely to both his roles. As Ticket, he moves like something let off a leash, all crouches and sudden springs, and hints at the more interesting movie buried in here.

Kiara Advani’s Nadia, the circus performer whose track gives Toxic its few honest emotional beats.

The advertised female perspective never turns up. Kiara Advani gets the only arc with real shape and plays it with restraint. Nayanthara does plenty with stillness in a role that hands her very little. Tara Sutaria, Huma Qureshi and Rukmini Vasanth are written as scenery, each waiting her turn in Raya’s story.

Ganga stares down an army. The script never gives her the same firepower.

By the time the final stretch swerves into stranger, more experimental territory, the film has burned through the patience a swing like that needs. Toxic has the money, the nerve and a star willing to bleed for it. A reason to care is the one thing it never gets around to.

Ticket, wiry and unpredictable, hints at the film Toxic might have been.