Formulaic 'pan-India' cinema risks killing creativity

The race to make the next 'pan-India' blockbuster will be the death of us. 'Death by boredom' and 'death by the dulling of the collective intellect' may soon be taught in medical schools if the country's richest producers and biggest male stars don't stop sending an unrelenting flow of generic tripe our way.

Which is to say that I've now watched the gangster flick Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, starring and co-produced by Kannada cinema superstar Yash.

This is Yash's first release since KGF 1 and 2 struck gold at the nationwide box-office in 2018 and 2022, respectively. Both were deafening, and steeped in the kind of aggressive masculinity pervading mass-targeted Indian films with larger-than-life male protagonists these days. So, it's not like I've been keenly awaiting his next. But I was intrigued by his team-up with director Geetu Mohandas for Toxic, considering that she has so far stood for the polar opposite of the KGF duology.


Geetu's Liar's Dice in Hindi was mellow. So was the first half of the Malayalam-cum-Hindi Moothon (The Elder One). Both were marked by empathy for the marginalised. Besides, she is known for her women's rights activism. That track record has mysteriously gone missing in this film, shot simultaneously in Kannada and English, that she has co-written with Yash.

Toxic is an incoherent, unfeeling, full-blown orchestra of noise and blood that revels in its overly sexualised, almost dehumanised representation of women as assemblages of legs and tongues, butts and bosoms. Yash plays the gangster Raya in this film, which kicks off in Portuguese-ruled Goa. Raya was raised by his elder sister Ganga (Nayanthara).

Here's a precis of Toxic: Raya looks cool as he strides towards the camera. Raya looks cool as he goes on killing sprees fuelled by gang rivalries and bitterness over his personal tragedies. Raya looks cool having wild sex with women. Raya sounds cool shooting off smart-alecky one-liners with his head tilted to one side.

Somewhere in a storm of dismembered male bodies, semi-nude female bodies, guns and blood is a story of Raya's love for the circus performer Nadia (Kiara Advani), whom he is forced to abandon while she's pregnant with their child. I suspect Toxic is meant to be a profound saga of toxicity bred by a man's yearning for the woman he loved and guilt over the son he left. But it's impossible to care, since zero effort has been invested in characterisation.

Men here possess no identifying qualities beyond being either Raya's enemy or ally. The women are his sister, his fiancee, his lover, his wife and/or objets d'art arranged around him by the production designer. One of them even describes herself as 'his permanent'.

This is not a review though, this is a plea to Indian filmmakers. Please stop.

Ever since SS Rajamouli dramatically expanded his reach beyond Telugu-speaking states, making the Baahubali duology a national craze and RRR a global phenomenon, India's filmmakers have turned 'pan-Indian cinema' into a genre in their bid to achieve pan-Indian success.

I'm no admirer of RRR or the Baahubali franchise. They were politically problematic and loud. But there's no doubt that Rajamouli creates living, breathing characters for the screen. Most of those trying to replicate his triumphs are aping him superficially, making soulless films distinguished primarily by their scale, multi-star casts (often drawn from various Indian language industries), violence, intellectual pretensions via shallow historical or mythological references, and the sidelining of women, if not outright misogyny. Hindi cinema has added Islamophobia to the mix.

Adipurush, Animal, Salaar, the YRF Spyverse, Toxic... each has competed with the other on a scale of insufferability. This trend is a slow poison that's discouraging creativity, and encouraging rootlessness under the mistaken assumption that cultural specificity reduces mass appeal.

Toxic epitomises everything that's wrong with contemporary Indian cinema backed by moneybags. It feels like a ChatGPT-generated LinkedIn post, not a film made by a human being.