Let’s be honest about the expectations here. When Yash follows up the KGF phenomenon with a gangster epic four years in the making, you walk in wanting to be blown away. Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown Ups, directed by Geetu Mohandas and released on August 26, 2026, is exactly the kind of film that carries the weight of that hype, and that’s part of the problem. It’s a movie with enormous ambition and real craft, but one that doesn’t quite hold together the way you hope it will.

This isn’t a takedown. It’s a fair look at what works, what doesn’t, and why a film with this much going for it still leaves you a little unsatisfied.

What Toxic Is About

Toxic is set in Goa in the years around Indian independence, while the region was still under Portuguese rule. It follows Raya, a gangster raised by his elder sister Ganga after their father’s death. The two avenge that death and rise through the underworld, and Raya slowly becomes a ruthless, feared figure, tangled up in relationships with Rebecca, the daughter of his boss, and Nadia, a circus performer he falls for.

From there it becomes a long, sprawling story of betrayal, lost love, and self destruction, spanning decades and continents. Its boldest move comes late. Raya’s vengeful son Ticket, who spends much of the film hunting him, is eventually revealed to be a split personality, the real Ticket having died years earlier. It reframes the whole film as one man’s spiral into guilt.

It’s a lot of story. And that’s worth keeping in mind, because a big chunk of the criticism comes down to how all of it is packed together.

The Writing Is Where It Stumbles

If there’s one place Toxic comes undone, it’s the screenplay, and it feels like the trouble started there. So much of the film is built around Raya that everyone else fades into the background. The supporting characters rarely get room to breathe or pursue anything of their own, and after a while you feel it. People move through the story without a clear sense of why they’re there. When the characters around your protagonist lack purpose, the whole thing gets shakier. The stakes soften, the emotional beats don’t fully land, and you’re left admiring individual moments instead of getting swept up in the story.

The pacing compounds it. Toxic moves fast, too fast for a world this rich. You’ve got 1940s Goa, colonial politics, shifting power in the underworld, a lot of texture that could have pulled you in. Instead the film keeps rushing to the next thing before you’ve had a chance to sit in the world it built. For a period gangster drama, that’s a missed opportunity. These stories usually earn their weight by letting tension simmer. Here, the quick cut editing keeps you at arm’s length when it should be drawing you deeper.

And the film’s most interesting idea suffers most from this haste. The title promises something. Raya is toxic, his sister Ganga wants him to rule the city, and by nature he’s a ruinous man. On paper that’s a strong hook. But the film never digs into what made him that way. His toxicity ends up feeling more like a label than something rooted in who he is or where he came from. The idea is bold. It just needed the backstory and psychology to actually support it.

Yash and Kiara Advani Carry It

Here’s the thing though. The performances are genuinely strong, and they hold the film together even when the writing doesn’t. Yash is excellent as Raya, and Kiara Advani is really good as Nadia. Neither character is written with much depth, but both actors bring so much conviction that you buy into them anyway. That’s not a small thing. It’s actors lifting the material well past where the script leaves it.

Yash’s dual role deserves specific mention. Playing both Raya and Ticket, he switches between the two with a confidence that genuinely does justice to the idea, which only makes you wish the story around that idea had been sharper.

Craft Without Enough Context

Credit where it’s due. Toxic looks fantastic. The action set pieces are well staged, the production design is rich, and you can feel the craft in every frame. The problem, again, comes back to story. As striking as these sequences are, they don’t always feel earned. The spectacle is there, but the context that would make it hit emotionally often isn’t. You’re impressed, but not always moved.

The music raises a fair question too. Was it necessary to bring in three music directors, Vishal Mishra, Ravi Basrur, and Tanishk Bagchi, for a single film? Spreading the soundtrack across three very different sensibilities can leave a movie without a clear musical identity, and Toxic feels a bit like that. The bigger letdown is the background score. Ravi Basrur’s work on KGF: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 was iconic, inseparable from Yash’s presence on screen. Teaming up again set expectations sky high, and this time the score just doesn’t reach the same heights. It’s an unfair comparison in some ways, but an unavoidable one.

Writing or Direction?

This is the question a lot of people keep circling back to. Given how heavily involved Yash was creatively, it’s hard not to wonder. Did his input pull the screenplay in too many directions, or did Geetu Mohandas simply lack the clarity to rein a sprawling story in? There’s probably truth on both sides. A director working to shape an enormous, personal vision, and a lead actor whose ambitions may have added scale at the cost of focus. Either way, the screenplay is where the film needed a firmer hand.

You can see that same ambition everywhere else, too. The scale, the multi language rollout, the sheer size of it. Yash has been open about wanting to take Indian cinema to the global stage. But that ambition may have worked against the film. In reaching so hard for something globally significant, it lost sight of the basics. Clear character motivation, a pace that lets you breathe, a screenplay strong enough to hold the spectacle up. Ambition is a good thing. Here it just ran ahead of the story.

A Huge Opening, Then a Sharp Fall

The box office tells its own story. After four years in the making, Toxic opened huge, reportedly over ₹150 crore on day one, the kind of number that screams blockbuster. But it didn’t last. From the very next day collections dropped sharply, and the film ended up falling well short of expectations given its budget and scale.

That pattern, a massive opening followed by a steep decline, usually points to one thing. Hype got people into theatres on day one, but the word of mouth wasn’t strong enough to keep them coming. For a film with this much anticipation behind it, that gap says a lot.

Criticism, Not Hate

One last thing worth saying. Yash’s contribution to Kannada cinema is huge. As an actor, he’s been one of the biggest reasons the industry has earned attention on a national and global scale. That matters when we talk about a film that didn’t land.

There’s a real difference between criticism and hate. Constructive criticism is how movies get better. It should always be part of the conversation, and this review is written in that spirit. But the personal attacks and hostility aimed at the Toxic crew help no one. Here’s hoping Yash and his team take the honest feedback on board, figure out what went wrong, and come back stronger, because based on everything they’ve done before, they’re more than capable of it.

What I Took From This as an Aspiring Filmmaker

Watching Toxic taught me something I didn’t expect to learn from a big budget gangster film, and it’s stuck with me since.

Story first, scale second. No amount of budget, star power, or ambition can rescue a screenplay that isn’t solid. Toxic had all three in abundance and still couldn’t paper over the cracks in its writing. As someone who wants to write and direct one day, that was a real wake up call. Scale should be something a strong story earns, not something that compensates for a story that isn’t there yet.

It also made character purpose concrete for me. Watching so many roles drift through the film without a clear reason to exist showed me how easy it is to fill a script with people who look important but don’t actually do anything. Every character, however small, needs a reason to be there. If I can’t answer why someone is in the story, the audience won’t be able to either.

And it’s a lesson in restraint. Toxic rushes through a world rich enough to sit in for hours, and it reminded me how much power there is in letting a story breathe. Not every moment needs to move fast. Sometimes the best thing a writer or director can do is slow down and trust the audience to stay with them.

If Toxic gave me anything as someone hoping to make films someday, it’s this. Ambition is not the enemy, but it only works when it’s built on top of a story that already knows what it wants to say.

Final Verdict

Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown Ups is a film of contradictions. Strong performances stuck in thin roles, gorgeous action without enough emotional context, and a bold central idea about toxicity that never fully explains itself. Yash and Kiara Advani rise well above the script, and the ambition is undeniable. But ambition alone couldn’t paper over a screenplay that lost its way.

It’s not a failure so much as a film that reached for something bigger than its own foundation could hold. A record opening followed by a steep fall only underlines that. And given everything Yash has done for Kannada cinema, that gap deserves honest, constructive criticism, not hostility.