Trojan Horse Or Extended Fantasy: Does Toxic Critique Toxic Masculinity Or Feed It?
Violence, Women and the A Certificate: Does Toxic Push Limits or Just Indulge Them?
Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups arrives as Yash’s long-awaited return after KGF Chapter 2, directed by Geetu Mohandas and positioned as something darker, more adult and more self-aware than the mass entertainers that made him a pan-India star. The film runs nearly 3 hours and 14 minutes. It carries an A certificate. It is soaked in blood, sex, drugs, guilt and larger-than-life imagery.
Early critical conversation has split between those who see it as a clever Trojan Horse that seduces viewers with the fantasy of toxic masculinity only to expose its rot, and those who find the excess so relentless that any intended critique is drowned out by the spectacle itself. Both readings deserve examination, because Toxic raises uncomfortable questions about what Indian mainstream cinema is willing to show, what the Central Board of Film Certification is willing to clear, and whether the Yash brand has begun to outweigh the actual movie-going experience.
The CBFC awarded the film an A certificate with what multiple reports describe as minimal intervention. Some accounts initially claimed virtually no cuts. Later details clarified that roughly thirty-four seconds of visual material were reduced or removed, alongside muted or replaced profanities and the insertion of statutory warnings on smoking and drug abuse. Specific changes included reductions in scenes of physical intimacy, particularly those involving the protagonist Raya with women on a bed, toning down of certain violent sequences including one involving a child and an electric saw, alterations to a blood-covered priest and the removal of a cross from assassins dressed as nuns.
Drug-use imagery was also scaled back in places. The net effect, however, is that the overwhelming majority of the film’s violence, sexual content and dark atmosphere reached theatres intact. In the United Kingdom the BBFC rated the same film highly for strong bloody violence, injury detail and sex, noting shootings, stabbings, throat-slashings, torture, dismemberment, sexual scenes and implications of child sexual abuse. The contrast with how other recent violent films were treated has not gone unnoticed. When a film built around hyper-masculine excess and the objectification of women sails through with only minor trims while lighter content elsewhere faces heavier scissors, the consistency of certification standards becomes a legitimate public question.
That question sits at the heart of the debate around women in Toxic. Yash’s Raya is written as a violent, lustful, emotionally absent man who moves through relationships leaving wreckage. The film shows him with multiple women, including characters played by Kiara Advani, Tara Sutaria and Rukmini Vasanth. Nayanthara appears as his sister Ganga, a figure of both sacrifice and ruthlessness. Huma Qureshi plays a more adversarial role.
Some reviews and several others argue that Mohandas deliberately constructs the seductive fantasy of the invincible, sexually dominant anti-hero before revealing the trauma inflicted on the women and children around him. Raya’s partners are left traumatised. His children inherit the consequences of his choices. By the final stretch the man who once seemed untouchable is consumed by guilt, ghosts and the ruins of the lives he damaged. In this reading the film is Trojan Horse cinema: it uses the grammar of mass masculine fantasy to smuggle in a condemnation of that fantasy.
The problem is whether the execution supports the intention. For long stretches Toxic luxuriates in the very imagery it claims to critique. The violence is extreme and prolonged. The sexual content is frequent and framed through a heavily male gaze. The runtime stretches past three hours, giving the audience ample time to inhabit Raya’s world of power, pleasure and destruction before any reckoning arrives. When the emotional bill finally comes due, some viewers report that the earlier indulgence has already numbed them.
Others argue that the late-stage guilt and surreal sequences of haunting and collapse are powerful precisely because the film first made the toxicity seductive. Both responses can be true at once. A film can intend subversion and still deliver so much unfiltered excess that the subversion feels secondary or incomplete. The women, while given moments of agency and pain, often function as mirrors or consequences of the male protagonist’s journey rather than as fully autonomous centres of their own stories. In a cinema culture already saturated with hyper-masculine revenge and domination narratives, the line between critiquing the fantasy and feeding it becomes extremely thin.
This brings us to the Yash brand itself. After KGF and KGF Chapter 2, Yash occupies a rare position in Indian cinema. His films are events. Opening day numbers for Toxic were strong, crossing one hundred crore net in India and generating substantial worldwide gross. Yet the subsequent drop was sharp, word of mouth mixed to negative, and the film has struggled to match the sustained momentum of its predecessor. KGF Chapter 2 benefited from franchise heat, clearer mass appeal and a more straightforward heroic arc.
Toxic is longer, darker, more sexually charged and more ambivalent about its central figure. The gap between opening numbers and later collections suggests that a significant portion of the audience bought tickets for the brand and the promise of Yash in mass mode, only to encounter something more complicated and less immediately gratifying. When the star’s aura becomes the primary reason people enter the theatre, the actual film risks becoming secondary.
The question then arises whether the Yash brand has grown more expensive than the movie-going experience it is supposed to deliver. High budgets, massive marketing and opening-day frenzy create expectations that a three-hour-plus exercise in moral ambiguity and graphic excess may not be equipped to meet for the broadest audience.
From KGF to Toxic the evolution is instructive. Rocky Bhai in the KGF films was a larger-than-life underdog who rose through violence and willpower in a world that rewarded ruthlessness. The films celebrated that rise even while showing its costs. Toxic attempts something more self-conscious. It wants the mass energy of those earlier films while also interrogating the damage such men inflict. The risk is that “more” has been mistaken for “mass.” More runtime, more blood, more sexual encounters, more surreal imagery, more guilt.
Excess can be a stylistic choice, but it can also become a substitute for focus. When every sequence is heightened, the moments that should land with force can blur into the surrounding noise. Mohandas brings a distinctive visual sensibility and a willingness to linger in discomfort. Yash commits fully to both the swagger and the eventual collapse. Yet the screenplay, co-written by the star, sometimes leans on exposition and circular cycles of violence and desire that test patience rather than deepen insight.
The film’s defenders are right to note that Toxic is more interesting than a straightforward celebration of toxic masculinity. In an era when many big-scale male-star vehicles still treat domination, sexual conquest and explosive violence as pure entertainment, any attempt to show the wreckage left behind deserves attention. The final stretch, with its ghosts, collapsing structures and intergenerational damage, contains genuine power.
The problem is structural. A Trojan Horse only works if the audience is still inside when the trap springs. If large sections of the audience have already checked out during the long middle passages of indulgence, or if the seduction is so complete that the critique feels like an afterthought, the strategy falters. Some viewers leave convinced the film has said something sharp about masculinity. Others leave feeling they have simply watched another extended fantasy of male power, this time with a late-arriving conscience.
Certification policy adds another layer. An A certificate is the correct classification for material this extreme. The relative lightness of the cuts, however, invites scrutiny of what the board chooses to protect and what it chooses to restrict. When graphic violence against bodies and prolonged sexual content involving power imbalances pass with only modest reductions, while other films face heavier intervention over far less, the process begins to look less like consistent application of standards and more like selective tolerance. Public trust in censorship depends on the perception of even-handedness. Toxic has become another data point in that ongoing debate.
Ultimately Toxic is neither a simple success nor a simple failure. It is an ambitious, uneven, frequently exhausting film that wants to have its hyper-masculine cake and critique it too. The violence is extreme. The treatment of women is complicated and often troubling. The A certificate allowed most of that material to reach screens with limited interference. The Yash brand delivered a strong opening that the film’s mixed reception could not fully sustain.
And the leap from KGF’s clearer mass energy to Toxic’s more is revealing: scale and intensity alone do not equal impact. Whether the film’s late reckoning with guilt and consequence is enough to justify the preceding excess will depend on the viewer. What is clear is that Toxic forces a conversation about the limits of mainstream excess, the responsibilities of star vehicles, and the thin line between exposing a toxic fantasy and simply prolonging it for three hours and fourteen minutes. In that sense, whatever its artistic shortcomings, the film has at least earned its title.
