Yash's Toxic was murdered on the edit table. Here's the autopsy

I've sat through a fair share of films where the idea was good on paper but somehow never made it to the screen. It's rare, though, that I walk out feeling like a film was actually murdered somewhere between the shoot and the release. Last year, that was Vijay Deverakonda's Kingdom. This year, it's Toxic.

Yash stepping outside his comfort zone, Geetu Mohandas, who is not just any regular female director, behind the camera, a genuinely ambitious psychological gangster drama on paper. I went in rooting for it. Like all others. And that's exactly the problem with saying all this, because it means I'm not writing this out of spite. I'm writing it because I watched something with real potential quietly fall apart in front of me.

And no, this isn't about pinning it all on one editor sitting on a timeline somewhere. Ujwal Kulkarni cut KGF 2 and Salaar beautifully, so the man clearly knows his craft. This feels bigger than one person's call. It feels like everyone in that room - writer, director, editor - somehow agreed that touching on a story was the same as telling one. It isn't.

American actor and filmmaker Orson Welles had a line about films being made on the edit table, and he wasn't just being clever: "The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room." It's the edit that actually walks you through the story and gets you attached to the people in it. Which matters a lot here, because Toxic's ambition is genuinely huge.

It's the KGF-style rise of a gangster in Portuguese-era Goa. It's the Animal-style unravelling of a man wrecked by his own vengeance. It's the Casino-style tragedy of someone who loves being loved more than he loves any actual person, falls in love, and keeps breaking until there's barely anything left of him. It's a bit of the Tamil film Mahaan (2022), starring Vikram, where a son is coming back to take revenge on a gangster father who abandoned him and his mother.

It's even a bit of Bajirao Mastani (2015), a psychological study of a man who wins the world and loses everyone he cares about along the way. Nobody's saying Toxic copied these films. It's just trying to be all of them at once, in one sitting, which is either wildly ambitious or a bit of a cry for help.

Unlike the team behind Toxic, let's not rush through this. Let's actually take our time and understand where the problem lies. There will be spoilers ahead, because there is no way to talk about what went wrong without getting into the characters, relationships and story.

A keema of every act

A world this big needs room to breathe. Toxic gives it about thirty minutes, and honestly, even that feels generous. The problem starts with the edit itself. It feels like two hours of story, character establishment and relationship-building have been taken to the cutting table and turned into keema, then squeezed into the first 15–30 minutes. Everything is technically there, but in such tiny pieces that nothing gets the time it needs to register.

Ganga, played by Nayanthara, and Raya's whole bond is built on two childhood scenes and a hope that you'll fill in the rest yourself. Gangs form, fall apart and turn on each other at an astonishing pace. Who's Victor, actually? What's the story with Marcus and his twin? Who is Nicholas? Why exactly are we meant to root for Sudev Nair's character? Who belongs to which gang? How are they operating? Which gang are the ladies from the ladies-vs-ladies scene part of? Who is Team Raya, and who is against him? Why are they against him? The film never slows down long enough to tell you.

The other relationships suffer too. Rebecca, played by Tara Sutaria, and Elisabeth, played by Huma Qureshi, barely get established before the story moves on. Rebecca falls, is betrayed and is suddenly heartbroken. Elisabeth's bond with her brother, played by Akshay Oberoi, barely gets enough time for us to understand who he is, who she is to him, or what they mean to each other before he's gone. Rukmini's Melissa also enters almost randomly.

The edit seems to have taken the "Jaldi bol, Panvel nikalna hai" meme a little too seriously. Within the first 15–30 minutes, almost 70 per cent of the movie's major beats have happened. Raya is rising, his backstory is covered, the world is introduced, characters are making moves, multiple relationships are running, people are being killed, heavy action unfolds and, by the interval, four of the five major women are dead.

If that isn't rushing, then what is?

Cramming this much plot into ninety minutes isn't hard. Making the audience understand it, feel it and connect with the people in it is the actual job. Toxic doesn't lack information. It lacks the time to make that information mean something. One striking scene cannot carry the weight of ten scenes that never got written, especially when the filmmaker has all the context in her head, and we only have what's actually on-screen.

Wrong choices made with confidence

Here's the odd bit. While the plot and characters get rushed past like a train that's late, the dialogues and slow-motion entries are in absolutely no hurry. Ask any character a simple question, and you'll get a monologue that sounds like a good morning forward from your uncle's WhatsApp status or a poster behind an autorickshaw.

Elisabeth wants to destroy Raya emotionally, the way he destroyed her. Except the brother whose death causes her grief barely exists before he's gone. It's hard to feel much for someone you never really met.

Then, near the pre-interval, Ganga finally gets her moment, gun in hand, about to show exactly how formidable she is, and the scene just cuts away before it lands. You do wonder whether that footage never existed or whether it got sacrificed somewhere along the way to keep the runtime down.

Gimmicky tricks in an otherwise solid film

The excessive dips to black, cuts to black and intercutting between scenes are techniques we've seen in KGF and Salaar. The difference is that those films use them for a purpose.

Intercutting works when one scene adds something to another, an action beat cutting to a reaction, a build-up cutting to an elevation, or one moment gaining meaning from what we're seeing elsewhere. Toxic often intercuts simply because it can. The scenes being connected don't always add anything to each other.

The aggressive cuts to black are even more frustrating when an emotional moment is building. Instead of allowing the scene to breathe or the emotion to land, the film cuts away. In KGF, even the car chase uses this grammar effectively because we're constantly getting action and reaction, building one off the other. Toxic applies the same trick to emotional scenes, where cutting away at the exact moment something should land only breaks the connection.

These techniques aren't bad. In the right hands, they're fantastic. But when the material doesn't justify the style, the trick stops feeling clever. After a point, it just gets frustrating.

The nail in the coffin

The bigger problem is that this probably would have worked far better as two parts, the way Dhurandhar did. That film spent its first instalment on setup, giving its characters room to earn their place before asking you to care about what happens to them. So when the pay-off came in part two, it meant something. Toxic wants that pay-off without putting in the work first.

Raya's downfall, which should be the emotional core of the film, is reduced to a song montage of rain, whisky and artfully messy hair. We're supposed to feel the weight of a man watching his world fall apart, but the film gives us the aesthetic of grief without the emotional groundwork for it. It's grief, but make it a perfume ad.

Which brings us back to Geetu Mohandas and the way she has described her process: "I write something else. I shoot something else. I edit something else. Then the film is out. Then I'm happy. I never stick to the script." Lovely as a personal philosophy. A lot less reassuring as the operating manual for a three-hour, multi-character crime epic that needed every department pulling in the same direction.

There's probably a genuinely great film hiding somewhere in this keema. Maybe a four-hour cut, maybe a proper two-parter. What was missing was the discipline to go find it. The vision was real. It just never made it off the edit table alive.