{"id":868733,"date":"2026-08-26T06:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T06:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/868733\/"},"modified":"2026-08-26T06:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T06:20:09","slug":"toxic-a-fairy-tale-for-grown-ups-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/868733\/","title":{"rendered":"Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups<\/a> will be released on August 26.<\/p>\n

A gangland action saga spread across five decades, Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups runs 194 minutes but plays like a trailer for something else. While it\u2019s technically a complete story \u2014 a rarity in the modern South Indian blockbuster landscape, where every other major release is actually a \u201cPart 1\u201d \u2014 the film is edited with the kind of snappy impressionism that becomes completely disorienting when you need to make sense of who\u2019s who, or quite simply who\u2019s standing where. Granted, the presence of bearded A-lister Yash of the KGF duology (often credited as \u201cRocking Star\u201d Yash) goes a long way toward making it tolerable at times. The actor has layered charisma and explosiveness in his dual roles as ruthless mafioso Raya, and eventually his spurned son Rumi or \u201cTicket,\u201d who seeks revenge for his abandonment. However, making sense of Toxic visually and narratively is a major challenge.<\/p>\n

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On the plus side, Toxic has a visual splendor given its period setting. The story runs from the 1920s all the way through India\u2019s independence in 1947, and even goes a few decades further, tracing the changing face of the former Portuguese port of Goa as a reimagined haven for a heightened drug trade awash in slick suits, fedoras, tommy guns, and lavish speakeasies. It\u2019s India\u2019s western coast by way of 1920s Chicago, a fanciful fa\u00e7ade that makes Toxic among the most expensive Indian movies ever made (certainly the most expensive one released thus far; it\u2019s out-spent only by S.S. Rajamouli\u2019s RRR follow-up, Varanasi, arriving in April, and the Hindu epic Ramayana: Part 1, also starring Yash and releasing in November). Alas, all this effort feels wasted on a completely unfocused movie whose soul resides in its opening and closing minutes but whose intervening three hours are a headache and a half.<\/p>\n

Opening at a circus in medias res, Toxic finds a young boy nicknamed Ticket (his face painted like a sad clown) being handed over by his manic acrobat mother, Nadia (Kiara Advani), to his vengeful father, Raya (Yash) \u2014 the first of several characters introduced angrily chugging a bottle of booze. This angst-laden intro engenders curiosity; something painful has clearly transpired in these characters\u2019 pasts, setting the stage for an explosive future. But the blanks are soon filled in at lightspeed. The powerplay for Goa\u2019s drug trade, going back several decades, involved Raya\u2019s unseen father alongside several Portuguese gangsters, each with their own family entanglements. Eventually, Raya and his steely older sister, Ganga (Nayanthara), become major players vis-\u00e0-vis a series of crisscrossing betrayals.<\/p>\n

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The film is quick to jump into its action set pieces, which feature blood and violence aplenty as well as the kind of macho heroic posing one might expect from a \u201cpan-India\u201d production emanating from the country\u2019s south, but things go quickly awry. Like many films aimed at multiple markets, Toxic was shot simultaneously in multiple languages \u2014 in this case, Kannada and English. The latter version is appropriately flowery for a story touted as a violent fairy tale, but its attempts at poetic dialogue end up simply explaining the meaning and subtext behind the story at hand as characters deliver every line like it\u2019s either a quip or a lofty proclamation. This has a numbing effect: After a while, no bit of dialogue actually stands out.<\/p>\n

Equally anesthetic is the litany of breakneck action. For the majority of its runtime, Toxic\u2019s story is told by way of some rival faction or another opening fire on Raya\u2019s crew as he overcomes the odds, but actually tracing who\u2019s who \u2014 or why anyone is doing anything at all \u2014 is a fool\u2019s errand. You could certainly turn your brain off to the movie\u2019s flip-book unfurling, but watching Toxic might just require you to turn your eyes off from time to time too. The sheer number of cuts with no legible point of focus or geography is disorienting to say the least.<\/p>\n

Watching Toxic might just require you to turn your\u00a0eyes\u00a0off from time to time too.\u00a0\u201c<\/p>\n

Sadly, the film\u2019s sloppy assembly doesn\u2019t end at its visual construction. Musically, it\u2019s stuck in the early-to-mid aughts, drawing from the soundtracks of international blockbuster and arthouse darlings of the era \u2014 In The Mood for Love, Donnie Darko, Requiem for a Dream, even The Dark Knight \u2014 without much by way of originality or coherent sonic identity.<\/p>\n

Ordinarily, the blame for all this would lie at the feet of the director, but in this case, it\u2019s hard to imagine that Toxic \u2014 at least, the completed version now in cinemas \u2014 is at all the brainchild of filmmaker Geetu Mohandas. Her last film, the Malayalam-language gangster movie Moothon, masterfully disguised a queer drama steeped in intimate anguish. But even as one of the few women to helm such a major Indian release, it\u2019s hard not to speculate about her actual influence (or lack thereof). Toxic feels like the product of a studio system bowing to tropes in the realm of hero worship and machismo, despite occasional attempts to subvert these expectations, with larger set pieces that depend entirely on misogynistic violence. It gets pretty gross on occasion, in a manner designed to satiate some kind of chauvinistic blood lust. <\/p>\n

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Yash\u2019s Raya is defined by philandering and sexist jabs, but the gaze of Mohandas\u2019 camera is markedly shifted from the male-centric lens of Indian mass media. Her focus during both sex and action is hairy chests and rolled-up sleeves instead of oily washboard abs, and her female characters are afforded more bodily dignity than the average heroine. However, these bare minimums don\u2019t amount to much in a story where actually tracing the characters\u2019 relationships is a game of Whac-a-Mole. Actresses like Nayanthara, Advani, Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria, and Rukmini Vasanth play women defined by their proximity to male gangsters \u2014 I\u2019d list them all, but mapping the tree of the movie\u2019s character dynamics would take several days \u2014 and they all eventually oscillate between stoic poise and outright yelling for minutes at a time until the drama becomes too grating to endure.<\/p>\n

This aural unpleasantness applies to Yash as well, who consumes the lion\u2019s share of the screen time as both the film\u2019s mournful protagonist as well as his vindictive son. Although Ticket only appears in the final act despite the hopscotching timeline, it\u2019s the rare role for which Yash has a thin goatee instead of a full beard, making him look practically unrecognizable (along with some digital de-aging). But is this enough to dramatically separate Ticket from his father? The answer is more complicated than \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno.\u201d That both men harbor the same incandescent rage is part of the movie\u2019s point about the cycles of male violence trickling through generations, and together, Yash and Mohandas manage to craft something special with these performances, even if we\u2019re only exposed to glimmers of that brilliance thanks to the haphazard cutting.<\/p>\n

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As Raya, Yash offers hints of a hidden self-loathing beneath his violent, womanizing exterior, while as Ticket, he creates a unique physicality through a character whose swift parkour motions feel like something out of a fever dream. Amid the movie\u2019s snowy and rainy settings, Ticket is the only human element that feels appropriately heightened beyond the expected limits of Indian action blockbusters. It might be one of Yash\u2019s finest performances to date; unfortunately, it\u2019s stuck in a movie where violence, although serving the thematic purpose of generational trauma, also seems to explode randomly, both from and against characters we\u2019ve never seen before, and whose motives and place within the story are head-scratching to say the least. Ultimately, the result is a banal story that sometimes explodes with jarring noise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups will be released on August 26. A gangland action saga spread across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":868734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-868733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/868734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}