Moothon to Toxic: Can Geetu Mohandas' bold filmmaking survive blockbuster scale?

There is a fascinating contradiction at the heart of Toxic: it is a massive Yash spectacle directed by Geetu Mohandas. The filmmaker built her reputation on Liar's Dice and Moothon, two films that move patiently, sit in silence and refuse easy resolutions. Toxic, meanwhile, operates on an entirely different scale — a gangster spectacle led by a star whose name is now synonymous with the KGF universe.But that framing misunderstands what Geetu does as a filmmaker. Her films may be intimate in scale, but they have never been timid in ambition. She is drawn to characters caught between identities, places and versions of themselves, using genre, geography and visual language to make those internal conflicts tangible. Toxic is therefore less a jump from “art house” to “commercial” cinema than a test of whether those instincts can survive when the canvas becomes enormous.Geetu and her unique voiceWhat separates Geetu from many filmmakers working in similar spaces isn't simply the subjects she chooses. It is her refusal to reduce her characters to a single identity or give audiences the comfort of a neat answer.In Moothon, Mulla dresses as a boy to survive, only to discover that masculinity offers no real protection. Akbar constructs an entirely different self, “Bhai”, to survive in Mumbai, until the person underneath becomes almost impossible to locate. When Mulla finally finds him, he recognises her before she recognises him, yet remains silent. Geetu doesn't resolve that conflict through confession or redemption. The film ends with Mulla, a year later, opening a brothel door in women's clothes and smiling. We are given no explanation for what that smile means. Geetu trusts the image enough to let the audience finish the thought. Liar's Dice follows the same instinct in a completely different world. Kamala travels from a Himalayan village to Delhi searching for her missing husband, but the journey gradually stops being about finding one man. It becomes about the machinery that makes migrant labourers disappear without consequence. There is no conventional rescue, justice or reunion.That is the through line across both films. Geetu seems interested in people forced to construct versions of themselves to survive, and in the gap between who they are and who the world allows them to be. Her craft serves that idea. Geography becomes psychology: Lakshadweep's open, almost mythical landscape gives way to Mumbai's claustrophobic underbelly, just as the mountains of Liar's Dice surrender to Delhi's chaos. Working closely with cinematographer Rajeev Ravi, she prioritises immersion over visual polish, relying on handheld camerawork, layered soundscapes and lived-in spaces to draw audiences deeply into her characters’ worlds. That doesn't mean Geetu is simply a filmmaker of restraint. Moothon contains violence, crime, sexuality and action. What she does differently is make those elements serve the character rather than spectacle. The violence tells us something about the person committing it; the geography reflects the character's emotional state.The challenge of going bigThat makes Toxic more interesting than the familiar “auteur director goes commercial” narrative suggests. Geetu isn't suddenly learning how to stage violence or work with larger ideas. She is being asked to operate at a scale where the machinery around the story can easily overpower the story itself.A Yash film arrives with expectations before the director's name even appears. There is a star, a massive production, pan-Indian audience and the commercial requirement to deliver spectacle. Every image has to work as a character, world-building and star vehicle.The question, then, isn't whether Geetu can make a blockbuster. It is whether she can make one without allowing blockbuster grammar to dictate what the film has to be. The real evolution happens when a filmmaker expands their vocabulary without abandoning their way of looking at people. If her earlier films asked what happens when ordinary people are pushed into extraordinary circumstances, Toxic gives her a far larger playground to explore that through a superstar and a gangster world. And then there is YashYash is not simply another actor in this experiment. KGF turned him into a cinematic image in his own right, complete with its own grammar of swagger, violence, physicality, elevation and myth-making. The danger for any director working with such a star is that the character can disappear beneath the persona.But that is also what makes Yash potentially fascinating for Geetu. She has spent her career looking beneath identities, stripping Nivin Pauly's familiar boy-next-door image away to find the damaged, volatile Akbar in Moothon. With Yash, she is starting with perhaps the most constructed identity of all: the superstar.That doesn't mean Toxic needs to deconstruct Yash or reject everything audiences love about him. It means Geetu has an opportunity to use that existing image rather than merely reproduce it. Yash gives Geetu access to scale. Geetu gives Yash the possibility of being seen differently within that scale.What the promotional material tells usThe early material clearly embraces spectacle: elaborate production design, violence, guns, sexuality, larger-than-life action and multiple shades of Yash's character. But there are hints of the tension Geetu likes to explore. The film has been described as a gangster story told through a female perspective, while the presence of several prominent female characters suggests the women may be more than decorative figures around the central male character. Whether the finished film genuinely carries that perspective is something only the film can answer.That uncertainty matters because spectacle can easily flatten complexity. A gunshot can become merely a gunshot, a fight merely an elevation scene. Geetu's previous work asks the opposite question: what does the image tell us about the person? If Toxic preserves that curiosity within its larger canvas, its scale won't be a betrayal of Geetu's filmmaking. It could be its next stage.The real experimentPerhaps the most interesting way to look at Toxic is not as Geetu Mohandas making a Yash film, but as Geetu testing whether her world-view can survive when almost every conventional rule of her earlier cinema changes. The locations are bigger, the action is bigger, the audience is bigger and the expectations are immeasurably bigger. But the question remains the same one that has quietly run through her earlier work: what happens to a person when the world around them decides who they are supposed to be?The exciting possibility is that neither Geetu nor Yash has to become the other. If she can bring her fascination with identity, contradiction and human behaviour into the grammar of a blockbuster, Toxic could show what happens when an auteur doesn't abandon her language to go big, but learns how to make that language speak at a blockbuster scale. It could be the point where her filmmaking stops being defined by the size of the films she makes and starts being defined by how much of her remains inside them.- EndsPublished By: Vineeta KumarPublished On: Aug 26, 2026 07:37 IST