I have been a genuine admirer of Geetu Mohandas ever since Liar's Dice announced her as a filmmaker with a quiet, specific intelligence and a real gift for finding the human story inside an unforgiving landscape. So when Toxic arrived with its sun-soaked Goa setting, its drug cartel premise, and its promise of something operatic and genre-bending, I was willing to follow her somewhere unexpected. Female action directors in Indian cinema are essentially unicorns, and the sheer ambition of attempting something this far outside her established register deserved genuine respect. That respect remains intact, even if the film itself left me with more questions than answers.
One important caveat before anything else: I watched the English language version, and I suspect that decision worked significantly against the film and against my experience of it. Dialogue that is already heightened in the way this genre demands becomes considerably more difficult to engage with when the delivery does not match the natural register of the language. Characters end up declaiming rather than conversing, and that creates a distance between the audience and the emotional reality of the scenes that the Kannada or Hindi versions likely do not suffer from in the same way. I am genuinely curious whether watching it with a regular theatrical crowd rather than in a small critics screening, and in the English language, might have been a meaningfully different experience. I say this not as an excuse but as an honest acknowledgment that context shapes perception, and mine may not have been ideal.
The film's inspirations were fairly legible from the trailer alone. The KGF DNA is visible, the Atlee-film energy is detectable, the Sandeep Reddy Vanga hyper-masculinity infused with raw violence is evident, and the mafia underworld scaffolding is assembled from familiar pieces, presented here with a confidence that borders on grandiosity. None of that is inherently disqualifying. Inspiration is not plagiarism, and Indian cinema has a long, productive tradition of operating within shared genre vocabularies while finding new things to say inside them. The question is always whether the filmmaker has something genuinely their own to contribute. Toxic has moments where that individual voice surfaces, but not consistently enough to define the overall experience.
Yash, for most of the film, is operating in the register his fanbase loves him for: the brooding, self-destructive antihero fighting his demons while taking everyone else down with him. He does this with real commitment, and for the audience who came specifically for that energy, this will likely feel like a satisfying return to familiar territory. What is more interesting is what happens in the film's later stretch when a second Yash character emerges. Something noticeably different surfaces there, a performance with more texture and surprise, and it represents the most alive the film feels. It arrives late, and there is not quite enough runway for it to fully register, but it is a genuine glimpse of something worth watching.
The female performances across the board are committed and deliver with real fire, even if the writing does not grant them the dimensionality they deserve. These are largely one-note roles executed with as much force as the material allows, which is a recurring frustration in a film that positions itself as something more ambitious than a straightforward mass entertainer. That the film does not pass the Bechdel test feels particularly notable given who is sitting in the director's chair.
Geetu Mohandas brings genuine visual flair to the material, and the Goa backdrop is used with a real eye for the contrast between surface beauty and moral rot. Some of the action sequences are staged with craft and a strong sense of physical space, and the sun-soaked aesthetic gives the film a textural identity that distinguishes it from the landlocked grittiness of its obvious reference points. The problem is not any individual sequence but their cumulative weight. Nearly three hours of relentless escalation eventually blurs the stakes, muddies the allegiances, and produces a kind of exhaustion where the deaths stop meaning what they should.
The film Toxic most wants to be is something genuinely operatic and mythic: a fairy tale for grown-ups where the violence carries ancient weight and the characters feel like elemental forces. Prashanth Neel has found ways to achieve that on screen, and the comparison is instructive rather than unfair. Melodrama and action at this register require a very specific kind of sustained directorial control, the kind that Mohandas, perhaps complicated by the co-writing dynamic with Yash, could not fully maintain across the runtime. The film loses its footing in places it cannot afford to.
I still believe in Geetu Mohandas. Liar's Dice and Moothon were real, and the filmmaker who made those films is still present in Toxic, even if she is occasionally overwhelmed by the scale she has taken on. This is not her best work, but it is a genuinely ambitious swing, and in a landscape where so few filmmakers attempt anything this large, that ambition deserves acknowledgment. Toxic will find its audience, and in the right language, with the right crowd, it may land considerably better than it did for me.
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