What might happen when a woman filmmaker gets the opportunity to make a film about violence and sex? What might happen when she gets access to all the familiar toys of the male-star vehicle: the punch dialogues, the star, the swagger, the slow-motion sequences, the sex, the violence… What might she bring to this cinema that we don’t generally get? As it turns out… quite a lot.

First, she refuses to see the protagonist, Raya, as a ‘hero’. Quite the opposite, in fact. The film isn’t interested in hero-villain demarcations, right-wrong judgments. Raya (Yash) himself says as much at one point. When you are in pain, morality stops seeming important. The film, in fact, has a lot to say about the nature of pain, about what happens when you live with it for so long that you begin to fall in love with it, when it begins to feel more like home than any real home ever could, ever did. There’s a fantastic song in the Tamil version, ‘Vittupogaadha Yen Vali’, that speaks of this dichotomy. “Vittupoiduma en vali, poi vidaadhe en vali…”

You’ve got Yash, chiselled and ready to kick ass, and usually, that’s reason enough for cinema like this to offer relentless setpieces… There are many here too, and plenty of brutality whose imagination I rather enjoyed (throat dragged on glass shards, ashtray ploughing into someone’s mouth, a pressed knee on a sword that decapitates someone…). But Toxic does something interesting with this all-too-familiar image of the arrogant alpha male, besotted with violence and sex. It implores us to see that he is broken… and that is why he’s like this.

And that makes sense because what healthy mind would seek power so desperately, relish violence as much, bury itself in dispassionate lust? In another film, these qualities would build Raya’s masculinity. Here, they reveal his damage instead. And so, no, the violence isn’t heroism here. It’s evidence. Severed limbs and broken bones seem to symbolise how Raya feels about himself. He inflicts the kind of pain he feels, and it’s still not enough.

The film is similarly interested in lust, and somewhere, through Nadia’s (Kiara Advani) words, there’s a lovely idea about the difference between using lust to mark territory and actually treasuring the woman you’re with. This film isn’t interested in validating lust with the approval of social structures; it’s just interested in respectful intimacy. And that’s why for perhaps the first time, Nadia is able to create rivulets of emotion in Raya’s impossibly barren soul.

One of my favourite moments in Toxic is when Geetu uses Yash’s powerful eyes to create two completely different gazes at Nadia. The first time Raya sees her, she is at the circus, at work, performing. His roving eye finds her, the contours of her body specifically, and there’s something predatory, thirsty, about the gaze. He looks at this strange woman like a man eager to possess her, desperate to bed her. Much later, after interactions with her that have softened him, Nadia is at a carnival, laughing and having fun on a ride, and someone is wondering whether Raya is even capable of love. We cut to him watching her. It’s the same pair of eyes, but everything has changed. The gaze is softer. Warmer. There’s something almost protective about it. And you know immediately that this is love. I felt like Toxic is most persuasive in these moments when nobody is explaining these ideas to us.

But it’s mostly not the case. I took a while to warm up to Toxic for this reason. Early on, someone asks what language Raya intends to speak with some pirates. We then see him killing them. We understand the answer immediately. But Raya still needs to tell us: “My mother tongue is violence.” And even that isn’t sufficient, as he further adds that it is a universal language. Some other contrived dialogue is trying to play around with “root” and “route”. Too often, the conversations in this film are exploited as opportunities to deliver punchlines.

Even that profound, crucial moment just before Ganga (Nayanthara) gets shot suffers from this. Nadia asks, “Kadhala? Arippaa?” and Ganga gives her the straight, simple answer. I found myself wishing Geetu had found a more beautiful, more cinematic way for Ganga to respond than simply having her make it so bluntly clear. There is some repetition in imagery too. Early on, violence is juxtaposed with sex: the breaking of a gate intercut with a potential orgasm inside a car. It’s a cool idea, but then, minutes later, people are being murdered while Raya is, you guessed it, making out. This thematic repetition is perhaps an issue with a film that runs for more than three hours.

But there’s no taking away from how painstakingly put together this film is. It looks rich and lush with detail, and images and moments rarely feel casually thrown in to fill runtime. There is a wonderful underwater portion, including the gorgeous image of a submerged ferris wheel. Something about a ferris wheel has always seemed tragically haunting to me. Perhaps it’s because of its association with nostalgia: carnivals, childhood, families, happy times. For that reason, an empty ferris wheel is a profoundly sad image, I think. And so, to see one underwater here feels heartbreaking. A monument to happiness has been drowned.

Given how masochistic Raya is, I found it hard not to feel layers of self-harm within this film. Raya isn’t just unafraid of death; it feels like he’s craving its release. A woman threatens him with a bomb wrapped around her body, and instead of terror, he’s almost turned on. Elsewhere, he says, “Death is less cruel than life.” To my surprise, I realised that hurt parts of me were nodding along. While on the subject of self-harm, somewhere in the beginning, Nadia slits her wrist, and I wondered if her apathy towards possible death made her seem particularly attractive to Raya. Later, Raya, I think, says something along the lines of, “Vidudhala kudu, indha kevalamaana vaazhkai lerndhu…” It’s all deliberately dark and psychologically distressing. I did feel seen.

All of this subtext is why Raya’s fearlessness seems more disturbing than heroic. It’s risky for cinema with blockbuster aspirations, but I loved that Geetu has still done her thing. She seems to ask, is it courage when someone who cannot wait to be ended walks towards their death? The film, which had won me back, began losing me in those indulgent portions involving Raya’s son and his kills.

Somewhere, I’d begun thinking of Fight Club, considering this too is about an emotionally unstable man who is addicted to fighting, incapable of healthy love… I thought of it more when Raya’s son gets punched and seems to relish it (reminded me of Brad Pitt in that basement scene). And then, the clincher: that final twist in Toxic. And yet, here, I thought it didn’t quite land with as much force. In fact, it almost seems to undermine what’s happened until then.

I think it’s strange, and perhaps fitting that Toxic should lose much of its vigour when it loses its women. By the time Rukmini Vasanth’s character recedes, long after Ganga has left us, long after Nadia has perished, the film seems to be dragging along lifelessly, quite like its protagonist. Raya is asked to look around him and confront the fact that he can’t seem to keep a single woman in his life. It’s sad, these cycles of violence. Broken people creating other broken people, who go on to break more people. Raya asks at one point: if peace could do the trick, why have people been fighting wars forever?

Toxic does offer quite a few answers. Pain becomes familiar. Familiarity becomes comfort. Violence becomes language. You hurt somebody because somebody hurt you, and eventually you don’t even remember what another language might sound like. Perhaps you fall in love, perhaps you entertain fantasies about peace and family, but pain, after all, is home, and sooner or later, you find your way back. That idea really moved me.

And this is ultimately why I see value in this film, even if its excess sometimes feels exhausting. Geetu Mohandas gets to play with the machinery of the testosterone-driven star vehicle, and rather than reject its pleasures, she participates in them, but then turns the machinery around to inspect the man, instead of celebrating him. While everyone is cheering, she asks: What happened to a man for him to be like this?

It’s the kind of question rarely asked. I’m glad Geetu did. I hope more women do.