Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups — Review

Raya is a gangster in Goa, before Independence. The film follows his whole life. His mother kills his father when he is a child. His sister raises him. He rises in the underworld. He falls in love with a circus performer. Then a tragedy breaks his mind.

That is a lot for one film, and the script keeps adding more before you have understood the last part. Reviewers kept making the same point. The film jumps between a gangster story, a brother-sister story and a father-son story, and the scenes that should join them are missing. The childhood part and the part where Raya joins the gang confused nearly everyone.

There is a twist near the end. The enemy destroying Raya turns out to be his own second personality, created after his son died. It is the best idea in the film. It is also the one most likely to lose the audience, because nothing earlier prepares you for it.

Mohandas is not just making another gangster film. She is trying to pull the gangster story apart and show what is underneath. Even the reviews that hated the film agree it was built for the biggest screen you can find.

The problem is control. The film tries so hard to overwhelm you that it forgets to keep things clear — who people are, what they want, even where they are standing. Several critics used the same words: a fever dream. Whether that sounds exciting or tiring to you is the whole difference between the 4-star reviews and the 1.75-star ones.

The editing shares the blame. At 194 minutes the film is somehow both too long and too rushed. Expensive sets flash past before you can take them in, and then the middle of the film drags badly.

Yash is the reason the film works at all. Two roles give him more to do than just look cool, and he is at his best when the two sides of him clash. The one complaint, raised more than once, is that he sometimes overacts. Raya also never feels as human as his KGF role did.

The supporting cast is the biggest waste here. Kiara Advani gets the best reviews of the women, and one big outlet called her the best thing in the film. Nayanthara is widely praised too. But Huma Qureshi, Rukmini Vasanth and Tara Sutaria get such thin roles that reviewers struggled to find anything to say about them.

That stings more than usual, because the film sells itself as a story about what women want. Several critics reached the same conclusion. The women are there to push Raya along, not to be people of their own.

This is the one thing everyone agreed on. Rajeev Ravi makes 1940s Goa look rich and real. Even critics who disliked the rest went out of their way to praise it. The circus attack scene is the one people keep naming.

The sets and costumes match that quality, and most of the effects work well. A few shots do look clearly fake, and they break the spell when they turn up.

Two complaints come up again and again. The cuts are too fast to let you enjoy what you are seeing. And the slow-motion shots copy the KGF style so closely that it feels familiar rather than fresh.

The background music gets real credit for lifting scenes the writing leaves flat. The songs land much less well. Reviewers called them just okay, or too electronic. With several composers on the album, nothing sounds like it belongs to one film.

Tabaahi is the one track people say works, helped by the way it is shot.

Toxic opened big. Around ₹101 crore in India on day one, and roughly ₹141 crore worldwide. The Hindi version had the second-biggest opening day ever for a dubbed South Indian film, behind only Pushpa 2.

Day two is the real story. Collections fell to about ₹36 crore, a drop of roughly 64%. Theatres went from about 56% full to about 27%. Films that people are recommending to friends do not fall like that.

Reaction online splits the same way the reviews do. People genuinely love Yash, the interval scene and the action. They are just as loud about the length, the slow patches and the confusing edit. The big opening was sold by the star and the marketing. What happens next depends on an audience that is still arguing with itself.