Originally posted by: Clochette
The way you narrated your thoughts, it was fascinating to me how logically it felt on the emotional/psychological level... maybe you have a sensibility for that... to me, it's a pity that the way violence gets shown hinders me to watch the movie... but I imagine the story now like in a book I would read (thanks to you and your fellow member Mahiwayyy 
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Thank you so much for being so appreciative and non-judgmental and patient about our discussion here ...❤️
Honestly I feel Its biggest failure may not have been the film itself, but the expectation it created before release.
Yes, the film has genuine flaws. The editing can feel disjointed, the screenplay could have been tighter, some action stretches are unnecessarily long, and a few mass dialogues and stylistic choices distract from the emotional core. None of that can be denied.
But being flawed isn't necessarily fatal...Lots of commercial movies of big stars are flawed..but Expectation mismatch can be fatal ..
The marketing largely sold Toxic as a larger-than-life gangster spectacle with stylised violence, swagger, provocative imagery, sexualised material, mass dialogues. So a large section of the audience entered the theatre expecting a straightforward, high-energy commercial entertainer.
Instead, underneath all that surface, the film was trying to talk about trauma, guilt, fractured memory, destructive love, family, abandonment and psychological collapse.
Those are two very different viewing contracts.And perhaps that's why the first-day reaction was so harsh. People hadn't necessarily come prepared to sit with Raya. They had come expecting to watch Raya.
The film actually required patience. It required us to go through certain unnecessary indulgent materials..accepting ambiguity, sitting through discomfort and paying attention to small emotional details rather than waiting for the next mass moment.
And I genuinely think the promotional campaign could have helped here. It didn't need to reveal the story. It just needed to reveal the soul of the story.it could have given us one or two hints that this isn't simply a gangster action film, show us the fractured psychology,Show us Raya and Ganga. Show us the emotional weight of Nadia. Let the audience know there is something darker and more introspective underneath the spectacle.
Then people could make an informed choice.
Because when you promise one genre and deliver another, even a good portion of your audience may experience the film as deception rather than discovery. Because ultimately you didn't deliver what you had promised..
And that's particularly unfortunate for Toxic, because it's exactly the kind of film whose strengths become more visible once you stop expecting it to be something else...I am fortunate that I went the second day already having a certain idea regarding what to expect and the possible themes and genre and that helped..
In that sense, I don't think its biggest tragedy is that it was flawed.
It's that many people entered the theatre on the first day with lots of excitement after buying tickets that were high priced ..looking for the movie the marketing promised them, while the movie itself was asking them to look for something underneath it....And movie never actually recovered from the first day debacle....
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