Aug 27, 2026 18:41 pm IST

Opinion | Toxic Knows Exactly What It Is Doing To Its Hero. And You May Have Missed It

Toxic's bait-and-switch goes beyond its plot. Geetu Mohandas is almost making a subtle point - for those who can see it.

Ishita Sengupta Ishita Sengupta Columnist

Ishita Sengupta Columnist

In Geetu Mohandas' Toxic, a hyperstylised manic dream that unfolds as a series of montages, one scene is allowed to breathe. The male lead is sitting with the woman he fancies. He has just been told off for being self-involved. So, he asks, "Do you think I am a bad guy?" "No," she replies. "I think you are toxic." For a film titled after an adjective, popularised by social media as both a terrible and enticing attribute, the narrative is expected to draw out its lure. Mohandas does that till she doesn't, introducing a jolting subversion to a genre that has been allowed to thrive by impunity.

Indian cinema is no stranger to toxic men. In the Hindi film industry, however, the shift was sudden. Shah Rukh Khan's character in Yash Chopra's Darr (1993) could be regarded as an early prototype. As Rahul Mehra, the actor played a stalker who would stop at nothing to get the woman he is obsessed with. It is an exceedingly unlikable character, offset with a tragic backstory (Rahul is a loner, and the only person who presumably understood him was his dead mother), and the portrayal. In Khan's hands, the fixation took the shape of unchecked love. Although the film reserved punishment for the excess (he dies), Darr brought troubled men to a middle-ground of sorts where they were no longer abject villains, deserving of apathy, but anti-heroes whose heroism was misled but not absent.

Toxic Men's 'Coming Of Age'

The script changed with Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Kabir Singh (2019), the........

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