Desi scrooge | 'Toaster'
Rajkummar Rao and Sanya Malhotra are quite watchable in Toaster, a Netflix black comedy with an unusual premise
In Toaster (Netflix), his maiden film as producer, Rajkummar Rao found inspiration in the most unlikely form—an animated character. To play a miser obsessed with reclaiming a toaster he once gifted—an obsession that spirals into chaos—Rajkummar drew inspiration from Scrat, the acorn-fixated squirrel in Ice Age. He used it to capture the emotional bond between a person and an object. “Ramakant is like, I want it back no matter what,” he says. “When he briefly gets the toaster, the way he looks at it and hugs it is just like the squirrel with the nut.”
In Toaster (Netflix), his maiden film as producer, Rajkummar Rao found inspiration in the most unlikely form—an animated character. To play a miser obsessed with reclaiming a toaster he once gifted—an obsession that spirals into chaos—Rajkummar drew inspiration from Scrat, the acorn-fixated squirrel in Ice Age. He used it to capture the emotional bond between a person and an object. “Ramakant is like, I want it back no matter what,” he says. “When he briefly gets the toaster, the way he looks at it and hugs it is just like the squirrel with the nut.”
Following Ramakant’s misadventures may remind audiences of Rajkummar’s Johnny in Monica, O My Darling—in both, his suffering becomes a source of comedy. But, for Rajkummar, Toaster differs from Vasan Bala’s Netflix title in a significant way. “The comedy [in Toaster] is more front-footed and out there; Vasan’s is more classic black comedy and noir,” he says. But the actor-producer agrees that both films derive their humour from a similar premise: comedy comes from tragedy. The films also bank on an ensemble of actors to add to the laughs. In Toaster, that task is divided between the supporting cast of Abhishek Banerjee, Archana Puran Singh, Farah Khan, Upendra Limaye and Seema Pahwa.
While Rajkummar and Sanya Malhotra, as his onscreen wife, are quite watchable as a bickering couple in this dark comedy involving murder, the supporting cast have little material to play with. Sanya, in particular, makes an impression as a suspicious wife and an enthusiastic true crime investigator.
Toaster loses heat as it stretches the tale with a blackmail arc that is neither compelling nor funny. There’s only so much heavy lifting that Rajkummar can do with a film perched on a wafer-thin premise of ‘not without my toaster’. Writers Parvez Shaikh, Akshat Ghildial and Anagh Mukherjee run out of ideas on how to keep the quirkiness quotient going and Ramakant’s silly adventure engaging. Toaster trudges towards the finish line with an odd detachment from its characters.
