By Meghana Harikumar | The Balcony Stories
Opinion
First, announce the universe. Then assemble the cast, identify the language markets, promise an unprecedented cinematic experience and release a poster that looks expensive enough to require its own insurance policy. Somewhere in this extremely busy schedule, someone should probably ask about the story. That, increasingly, is my worry about the ambition packaged as “pan-India cinema”. The desire to reach everyone is understandable. The assumption that a film can be assembled to everybody’s presumed specifications is where things get interesting—and occasionally exhausting.
Nani has questioned the label itself. Speaking during promotions for The Paradise in Chennai, the Telugu actor asked why films from South India receive the “pan-India” description when Hindi films travelling across language markets continue to be called Hindi films. “Why is it introduced for the South Indian films? Why isn’t it used for Hindi films?” he asked during the promotional interaction, citing Jawan and Pathaan in his comparison. It is a fair question. But the criticism surrounding Yash’s Toxic makes me want to add another: when does the ambition to travel begin interfering with the film we are being asked to watch?
The modern “pan-India” conversation gained momentum around the Baahubali films, although Indian cinema had been crossing language boundaries through dubbing and remakes long before that. The newer development was the intensity with which nationwide appeal became part of a film’s advance identity. An examination of the phenomenon traces that distinction. There is genuine value in making a film available to more people. Better dubbing, wider distribution and thoughtful promotion can help a story find viewers who might otherwise never encounter it. But “available in five languages” is a practical statement. “Made for everybody” is a rather ambitious promise.
Everybody is a difficult person to write for. Everybody apparently wants romance, violence, emotional trauma, glamour, international styling and a second-half revelation. Everybody also has a train to catch after three hours. My problem begins when the imagined national audience becomes a checklist that the screenplay must accommodate. A story needs characters with particular desires, habits and contradictions. A marketing plan needs territories. Confusing the two can leave us with a film that knows exactly where it wants to open and rather less about what it wants to say.
Directed by Geetu Mohandas and led by Yash, Toxic assembled an ensemble including Nayanthara, Kiara Advani, Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria and Rukmini Vasanth. That is considerable talent to place inside one film. The critical response, however, raised questions about what the writing gave those performers to do. One review of the film praised aspects of its imagery and Kiara Advani’s performance while finding several other female character arcs underdeveloped. A separate Bengaluru-based review appreciated Yash and the supporting performers but criticised the screenplay, editing and length. Its assessment also allowed that dedicated action-film viewers could find something to enjoy.
Those responses do not establish one unanimous audience verdict. They do provide a useful basis for discussing the gap between an impressive package and sustained involvement. For me, this is where Toxic becomes relevant to Nani’s argument. The label promises breadth. The criticism asks about depth. You can introduce an extraordinary number of people on a poster. Eventually, you must introduce them properly in the film.
The casting question deserves more precision than “too many actors from other industries”. An actor does not need a particular birthplace to make a character believable. Cross-industry casting can bring fresh combinations, different performance styles and considerable excitement. Kannada cinema should have access to talent from anywhere. What I question is the expectation that recognisable names will create emotional connection automatically. When a cast list begins to resemble a distribution map, the writing has to work especially hard to make the characters feel like inhabitants of the same world.
Otherwise, the audience becomes aware of the assembly: here is the star, here is the glamorous arrival, here is the important relationship that the film has not quite made us feel. I cannot know the commercial reasoning behind each casting decision in Toxic. My criticism is of the larger temptation its reception brings into focus: treating the presence of a performer as an achievement equivalent to developing their part. The actor has arrived. The character is still looking for an address. If you have hired someone capable of holding a scene, give them a scene worth holding. A dramatic introduction followed by narrative unemployment is a peculiar use of talent.
This brings me to the part of the debate that interests me most: the fear that a film might become so preoccupied with finding its next audience that it takes its existing audience for granted. That concern deserves space. But “Kannadigas rejected Toxic because of the cast” would be too sweeping. Reviews cannot tell us what an entire linguistic community thought, much less establish one cause for its response. Nor should Kannada audiences be treated as a single person with a fixed menu of acceptable stories.
A Kannada film can be set in Goa, explore unfamiliar worlds, employ actors from other industries and experiment with form. It does not need to present a local landmark every fifteen minutes to renew its identity. What matters to my argument is a sense of belonging within the film itself: speech that feels inhabited, relationships that develop, characters whose behaviour has meaning beyond the next dramatic entrance. A film can take us somewhere unfamiliar and make us feel completely involved. It can also give us a familiar superstar and leave us emotionally outside the door.
The connection with a home audience should never be treated as an automatic subscription. Affection for a star might bring someone into the theatre. What happens after the lights go down remains the film’s responsibility. Ambition earns interest. Connection has to be built. Asking viewers to appreciate the size of the undertaking is understandable; expecting that appreciation to replace their response to the story is asking for an entirely different service. We bought tickets, not shares.
There is a particular kind of blockbuster anxiety that seems determined to prevent the audience from ever having an ordinary minute. A conversation must become a confrontation. A character entrance must arrive with a weather event. An emotion apparently requires witnesses, smoke and a background score capable of moving furniture. Used well, spectacle is exhilarating. But escalation needs contrast. If everything announces itself as the biggest moment in the film, the film eventually starts competing with itself.
That is the danger I see in forcing a story into an imagined pan-India mould. The screenplay may begin servicing expectations about scale before it has established why we should care. This is my reading of the broader problem, rather than a claim about instructions issued inside Toxic’s production meetings. The published criticism of its excess and uneven character development makes the question worth asking. It does not give us access to the filmmakers’ intentions. Still, a distribution strategy cannot supply a missing emotional beat. Neither can another famous face, another language version or another declaration that the audience has never seen anything like this before. Sometimes the audience would happily settle for knowing why two people in the same scene matter to each other.
There is also a qualification to make about Nani’s argument. Hindi productions pursue multilingual audiences too. Brahmāstra, for example, was announced in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, with Rajamouli presenting it in southern India. The studio’s announcement makes that strategy explicit. The conversation should therefore examine consistency rather than impose an absolute division between industries. If “pan-India” describes distribution, apply it consistently. If it describes audience acceptance, wait for audiences to respond. And if it is simply an impressive adjective, perhaps allow the film to earn a few of those after release.
I understand Nani’s impatience with a label that can make national relevance sound like a special upgrade for a South Indian film. I also understand the frustration behind criticism of films whose enormous ambition appears better developed than their characters. Both concerns ask whether the language of expansion is helping us understand cinema or distracting us from it. Make the film in Kannada. Cast from wherever the story requires. Take it to as many screens as possible. But before announcing that the film belongs to the whole country, give the person sitting in one seat a reason to care.
