Toxic Movie Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Toxic is a visually stunning and consistently entertaining action crime film that gives Yash the kind of layered, morally complicated role he was born to play — but the screenplay’s tendency to prioritize aesthetic cool over genuine emotional depth leaves the film feeling slightly hollow at its centre despite the extraordinary craft surrounding it.
Yash is worth every minute of your time, and the production values are among the finest in recent Indian cinema, but Toxic ultimately does not quite reach the emotional heights its ambition demands.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Director: Geetu Mohandas
Release: August 21, 2026
Language: Multiple
Cast: Yash, Nayanthara, Kiara Advani, Bobby Deol, Hina Khan
Runtime: ~160 mins
After the extraordinary global reach of the KGF franchise, expectations for Yash’s next film were never going to be modest.
Toxic arrives carrying the weight of that anticipation and makes a very specific creative choice in response to it — rather than delivering another mass entertainer in the KGF mould, director Geetu Mohandas has crafted something more stylistically ambitious.
Whether that ambition fully pays off depends considerably on what you are looking for. The story follows Ayaan Khan, a man operating at the intersection of pharmaceutical crime, biological weapons, and international drug trafficking.
Ayaan is simultaneously brilliant, dangerous, and deeply complicated — a character whose motivations the film deliberately keeps opaque for long stretches before revealing the full picture.
The world he inhabits is rendered with extraordinary production values — European locations, sleek interiors, the kind of visual language that communicates power and threat before a single line of dialogue establishes them.
Yash is magnificent in the role. There is a stillness to this performance that is markedly different from his KGF work — less operatic, more controlled, and more genuinely unsettling for it. Ayaan does not need to shout or gesture grandly to make clear that he is the most dangerous person in any room.
He simply walks into the scene, and the film shifts around him. When the character finally reveals what drives him — a motivation connected to pharmaceutical companies suppressing cures for financial gain — the performance finds an emotional register that the screenplay does not always sustain, but Yash absolutely does.
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Nayanthara as Meera brings the kind of grounded authority the film needs as a counterweight to Ayaan’s volatility. She holds her own completely, and their shared scenes have a tension that suggests an equal rather than a supporting presence.
Kiara Advani handles her role with confidence. Bobby Deol continues his remarkable run of compelling villain performances, bringing cold intelligence to a corporate antagonist who believes entirely in the logic of his own ruthlessness.
Geetu Mohandas directs with a visual confidence that marks every frame. Santosh Sivan’s cinematography is genuinely breathtaking in places — the European sequences in particular achieve a visual grandeur that Indian cinema rarely manages outside of the very biggest productions. The action choreography is inventive, and the background score keeps the atmosphere taut throughout.
The screenplay is where Toxic most consistently disappoints. Emotional beats that should land with real weight are underdeveloped, particularly the relationship threads that are supposed to make Ayaan’s choices feel genuinely consequential. Some subplots are introduced with care and resolved with haste. A film this ambitious deserved more time on its human relationships.
Still, as pure cinema — as visual spectacle anchored by a truly commanding lead performance — Toxic delivers considerably more than it frustrates.
Toxic is now playing in cinemas.