Rocking Star Yash's Toxic, directed by Geethu Mohandas, found its way into controversy columns the moment its first glimpse dropped. The visuals promised an unusually bold, erotically charged tone, and the film quickly became the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons. Cut to the actual release on August 26th, and the film was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews, with many calling it a full blown disaster. So the reports are unanimous: Toxic is bad. But how bad, exactly? Here's a look at what went wrong.
Let's start with the elephant in the room: Yash himself. Even as accusations and controversy piled up, he stood firm, insisting nothing in the film crossed a line, and that every bold moment was essential to the story. Having watched the film, we actually agree with him on that specific point.
As the title suggests, the film is a detailed character study of Raya, a man who is toxic by nature. Raya endures a horrific childhood alongside his elder sister Ganga, played by Nayanthara, and the trauma from that period shapes everything that follows. He grows into a ruthless gangster, eventually joining forces with another gang to expand his operations. That alliance, with Salvador Almeida, comes with a condition: marriage to Salvador's daughter, Rebecca, played by Tara Sutaria. As the story moves forward through an overwhelming amount of guns, blood, noise and masculinity, Raya crosses paths with Nadia (Kiara Advani), the headlining act of a travelling circus troupe. He falls for her, marking the first genuinely emotionally vulnerable moment of his life in the story. Nadia becoming Raya's mistress inevitably creates conflict with Rebecca, which spirals outward to involve Salvador too. It all builds to a massive blowout that costs Raya something deeply personal, and he pulls away from Nadia entirely, even as she's left pregnant with his son. The rest of the film follows Raya's past catching up with him, dragging him down a path of guilt, misery and eventual self-realisation.
Now, having said all that, I genuinely had to look things up on Wikipedia after the first half just to understand what was actually happening on screen. There was grandeur. There were epic action set pieces. There was style and swagger in abundance. But clarity? None. Apparently the underlying story is quite simple, but all that scale and spectacle invites a complexity into your head that doesn't actually exist in the writing itself. This is the film's core problem. What could have been a simple, effective tale gets buried under unnecessary detours and drama, stretching the first half into a genuine slog. Right around the interval, things finally start feeling less foggy and more meaningful, only for editor Ujjwal Kulkarni to throw in a jarring, meaningless blackout that plunges the rest of the first half back into confusion. That's the second major issue: the editing. Pair a needlessly complex screenplay with editing that doesn't help clarify it, and you get exactly this kind of result.
Ravi Basrur's score is loud enough that it neither elevates the film nor manages to rescue it. Most of the time, it just exists because a film like this is expected to have one. Yash, on the other hand, is genuinely extraordinary, and he's doing double the work here, playing both Raya and a second character named Ticket. Across both roles he brings style, swagger, and crucially, real emotional depth. What felt missing from him as an actor in KGF is fully present here, and then some. While most attention going in was on Nadia to deliver the anticipated intensity, it was actually Tara Sutaria who emerged as the film's biggest surprise. She's exceptional throughout, and her character is written with real care. Nadia, by contrast, is a complex, well constructed character on paper, but much of Kiara Advani's performance in the role comes across louder and less controlled than it needed to be, even though she looks stunning and commands the screen physically throughout. Nayanthara gets a stylish, substantial character that genuinely anchors the plot.
Then there's Melissa, played by Rukmini, who exists as one of the film's most baffling loose threads. She's in love with Raya, we're just never told why. She shows up in his world, we're never told from where. No backstory, no context, no build-up, just a character the script assumes we'll accept on faith. It's a small thing on paper, but it's symptomatic of everything wrong with Toxic's writing as a whole.
Taken as a whole, Toxic had real potential, but it's undone by a bloated screenplay and lazy character work. There's no real establishment of who Raya is or how he became this way. Rather than jumping straight into conflict after conflict, a bit more groundwork on how and why these relationships fractured would have gone a long way toward building genuine emotional investment. The entire film hinges on Raya's relationships with the people around him, and that foundation simply isn't built. Without it, the big reveal at the end lands as a missed opportunity rather than the gut punch it's clearly meant to be.