Toxic: A Fairy Tale That Forgot to Grow Old

Geetu Mohandas has made a film that is rather like a handsome man walking into a drawing room wearing an extraordinarily expensive suit and then spending three hours telling you how much the suit cost.

There is no shortage of ambition in Toxic. There are gangsters, damaged children, beautiful women, fathers and sons, sisters who love too much, lovers who suffer too much, guns, blood, smoke, churches, circuses and enough darkness to make one suspect that the electricity board had disconnected the entire set.

And yet, beneath all the decoration, there is a very good story struggling to get out.

The story is Raya's.

Not the gangster Raya. Not the swaggering Raya. The little boy buried somewhere inside him.

That is where Geetu Mohandas has found her richest material.

Raya and Ganga are children who have learnt the first lesson of survival early: nobody is coming to save you. Ganga therefore becomes more than a sister. She becomes his shield, his conscience, his accomplice and eventually his prison.

This is where Nayanthara's Ganga becomes the film's most fascinating creation.

She loves Raya with the kind of love that should come with a government warning.

She has spent so much of her life protecting him that she can no longer distinguish between protecting him and possessing him. She wants him safe, powerful and invincible. Unfortunately, the easiest way to make a man invincible is to make him incapable of tenderness.

Then comes Nadia.

Kiara Advani's Nadia is not merely the woman Raya loves. She is the life he might have had.

That makes her more important than the conventional romantic heroine. She offers Raya something Ganga cannot: an escape from the mythology of Raya.

With Nadia there is the possibility of being a lover, a father, an ordinary man.

Raya, naturally, chooses to remain extraordinary.

This is the tragedy of the film. He gets everything a gangster could want and loses everything a human being might need.

And then comes Mellisa, almost like a second chance sent by the gods. Raya builds another family. He has another son.

But trauma is a persistent creditor. It does not accept a change of address.

The past eventually arrives in the form of Ticket.

This is where Toxic could have become a magnificent tragedy.

A father confronts the son he abandoned. The son confronts the father who chose power over him. And the father is forced to confront, perhaps for the first time, the child he once was.

There is a Greek tragedy somewhere in here.

Unfortunately, it has been dressed as a gangster extravaganza.

That is the central problem with Geetu Mohandas's direction.

She has an excellent eye.

Almost every second scene seems to have been composed by someone who has spent sleepless nights thinking about light, shadow, faces, costumes, smoke and symmetry. The film is frequently beautiful.

But cinema is not a photography competition.

A beautiful shot is not necessarily a dramatic scene.

And a dramatic scene is not necessarily a story.

Mohandas sometimes moves from one striking image to another as though she is turning pages in an illustrated book. The pictures are arresting; the connective tissue is missing.

The irony is that her characters are often more interesting than the screenplay that contains them.

Take Ganga.

There is enough material in her life for an entire film: childhood trauma, devotion, possessiveness, complicity, guilt and finally sacrifice.

But the screenplay occasionally behaves like a man in a hurry to catch a flight. It tells us where she has arrived without allowing us enough time to travel with her.

The same happens with Nadia.

One understands what she means to Raya.

One wishes one had been allowed to know what Raya meant to Nadia.

That distinction is important.

The film tells us the mythology of these women. It doesn't always give us their humanity.

And then there is Yash.

He is perfectly cast as Raya because he possesses the rare ability to make arrogance look almost architectural. He doesn't enter a room; the room seems to rearrange itself around him.

But even Yash cannot solve the screenplay's fundamental problem.

Raya is fascinating because he is damaged.

He is less fascinating when he is simply powerful.

The film spends an enormous amount of time showing us what Raya can do. It should have spent more time showing us why he became the man who can do it.

That is where the film loses its emotional grip.

Geetu Mohandas clearly wants Toxic to be a fairy tale for adults. And I like the idea.

Fairy tales are really stories about children discovering that the world is dangerous. Adult fairy tales are about discovering that the monsters we feared as children may have been inside us all along.

Toxic understands this.

Raya is both the monster and the wounded child.

Ganga is both his protector and the person who helps create the monster.

Nadia is the road not taken.

Mellisa is the attempt to start again.

Ticket is the past refusing to remain buried.

There is poetry in that architecture.

But poetry needs rhythm.

And Toxic sometimes mistakes accumulation for profundity.

More symbolism. More spectacle. More characters. More twists. More darkness.

The film keeps adding ingredients to a dish that was already perfectly capable of being delicious.

The result is not tasteless. Far from it.

It is simply over-seasoned.

Perhaps the cruelest thing one can say about Toxic is that its best film is visible inside the film we have been given.

It is hiding in the relationship between Raya and Ganga.

It is hiding in Nadia's tragedy.

It is hiding in Ticket's return.

It is hiding in the possibility that the gangster empire is merely a gigantic monument built by a frightened boy to convince himself that he can never again be abandoned.

That is a terrific film.

Geetu Mohandas almost makes it.

Almost.

But she is so busy building the palace that she occasionally forgets to let us hear the child crying in the basement.

And that is why Toxic leaves an unusual aftertaste.

You don't come away thinking, What a stupid film.

You come away thinking, What a missed opportunity.

The film has ambition, imagination and some genuinely memorable characters.

What it lacks is the one virtue that would have made all those virtues matter more:

restraint.