What makes Geetu Mohandas' Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups a fairy tale for grown-ups, I suppose, is its schemes, manipulations, betrayals, and murders unfolding among brothers and brothers, brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, fathers and sons, and vice versa. The familial relationships are either shaky or tragically uprooted due to tragic circumstances. It's the kind of film where a newborn infant gets to taste blood first. It's the kind of film where a wife stabs her husband. It's the kind of film where a sister is made to shoot her brother. It's the kind of film where a boy's lover is forced to shoot the boy's sister. It's the kind of film where a father points his gun towards his son, who cries and cries because he just wants to be loved by his father. This is some dark, "grown-up" stuff, all right, but Toxic, alas, is also the kind of film that merely runs on thin, undeveloped ideas. It's more interesting to listen to or describe as an outline for a film, while the experience of watching the film itself is just an unremarkable chore that, with all its loud noise and blood-soaked aura, only amounts to something trivial.
On the one hand, Mohandas wants to make a gangster epic with the kind of bearded, macho, mainstream anti-hero who has a cigar permanently stuck to his mouth and whose animalistic nature becomes a source of attraction for the women—they like this unshaven, masculine criminal—and an excuse for pulling the trigger every few minutes. On the other hand, she also wants to psychoanalyze this man and use his trauma to create a fractured character who, more than anything, ends up hating himself. Raya (Yash) seethes and simmers over the gloomy flames of self-revulsion. He is plagued by emotions of disgust, depression, and impotence. There is a reason why Rumi/Ticket (Yash again) looks like Raya and why each sees the other as a villain. The reasons go well beyond the fact that the two share the relationship of a son and a father. To talk about that reason would be to get into spoilers, so I will stop here. The idea itself is pretty awesome, if also unoriginal, as it leaves you with a David Fincher movie hangover—the mention of that Fincher film would spoil the plot twist of Mohandas' epic, which is why I am being vague.
But where Mohandas fails terribly is in providing her characters with psychological depth. With bare backstories that simply convey that something happened and bare relationships that solely depend on the fact that someone is someone's brother or father or mother, Mohandas proves inept at sucking us into her vision of grief, lust, and violence. Not a single death scene is affecting; all the melodrama merely plays out on the faces of the actors, who are all quite adept but left lifting hollow cliches. Much noise was made about Toxic's sexual content when its teaser was released online, but the sex in the film is almost cartoonish—there is no sensuality, no intimacy, no pleasure. The scene where Raya and Nadia (Kiara Advani) hook up in the car—after which she tells him that the next time he makes love to her, he must seem like her lover, not owner—is almost laughable because Nadia seems almost unresponsive and Raya seems all tense, as if both are under the grip of an intimacy coordinator sending them instructions from outside the frame. I have seen condom advertisements on TV with more spontaneity and great eroticism. Similarly, the action sequences are overly choreographed and rendered ineffectual. A bullet's path, in slow motion, is traced so that we can see it hitting a bird, and Raya smashes a man's head against glass and drags his neck around the glass pieces. Yet in both cases, we don't flinch or even sit up in excitement. What Mohandas dispenses is a sense of "coolness," a set of cold, calculated movements that call attention to their design, leaving their effect unfelt.
Perhaps to imbue this material with a "woman's touch," Mohandas gives us a scene between Ganga (Nayanthara) and Elizabeth (Huma Qureshi) that begins with the latter almost winking at the audience as she says, "Ab log kahenge ki aurat hi aurat ki sabse badi dushman hoti hai." Yes, I watched the Hindi-dubbed version because there was no other option, and yes, the dubbing is atrocious. With lines like "Ladki ka haseen hona kamaal hai. Par ussi husn ko hatiyaar bana le toh saala bawaal hai," who needs a gun or a knife to inflict violence? This tenth-rate dialogue-baazi ensures that we walk out of the theater with bleeding ears. Anyway, coming back to Ganga and Elizabeth, or even Nadia, Rebecca (Tara Sutaria), and Mellisa (Rukmini Vasanth), for that matter, they just get to exude their authority with their sharp gazes that anyway amount to little more than screen presence. They all, in one way or the other, revolve around Raya. Their actions and reactions heavily depend on Raya's actions and reactions. What Mohandas, either intentionally or unintentionally, ends up exalting is a conservative vision of a society where bearded, macho men get to brood stylishly and bed multiple women, while the women remain sexually and romantically faithful to one destructive man and are seduced by his psychopathic or misogynistic behavior. Or they are like Ganga, who chooses not to indulge in lustful desires.
Toxic certainly has its share of male fantasy, which it quite unsuccessfully tries to dismantle later. It would be fair to say that Mohandas was influenced by Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Animal. And I mean this in the sense that she, too, reveals the real villain of the story much, much later, after the interval. But Vanga sustained the energy of his action drama with a thrilling style and demented situations. Mohandas' filmmaking, by comparison, is as chintzy and amateurish as Sukumar's in Pushpa, Kalees' in Baby John, and Atlee Kumar's in Jawan. Almost every scene is in a mad rush to nowhere. The scenes, in fact, are reduced to narrow visual pointers that only channel what's written in the pages of the screenplay. The movie becomes nothing more than blocks of chopped pieces.
There is another element that unites Toxic with Animal: both are about a son's crazy obsession with his father. Mohandas, though, takes this idea to another dimension—a dimension that reveals itself during the last five or ten minutes. I admit I surrendered to these moments with a bittersweet smile on my face. Why bittersweet? Because they tell you what kind of filmmaker Mohandas can become someday and what she doesn't become here. The dreamy, subjective flourishes are a sight to behold, though they also stick out like a sore thumb, given that nothing that came before in Toxic actually lends support to this sudden flow of creative fervor. In this respect, Toxic most resembles Mohandas' Liar's Dice, as both movies deal with subjects that the films themselves are unable to do full justice to because the director concentrates on things that undermine the real message, the real intentions. There is an imaginative, ambitious filmmaker within Mohandas waiting to announce her presence. That part of her, so far, has only appeared in bits and pieces. I am eagerly looking forward to the day she emerges unchained. That moment would be worthy of a grand celebration. For now, we can just sigh in pity and breathe the "toxic" air in the movie theaters. Oh well.
Final Score - [5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times