Toaster Review: The Only Thing That Works In The Netflix Film Is The Appliance

There's something oddly poetic about a film titled Toaster ending up... burnt. Not the charming, golden-brown kind you'd proudly plate, but the kind you scrape off with mild regret, wondering where it all went wrong. 

At its core, Toaster thrives on a delightfully absurd premise: a miserly man so devoted to saving every rupee that he sets off a domino effect of increasingly bizarre events, all for the sake of reclaiming a gifted appliance. 

It's the kind of setup that promises a sharp, situational comedy, one that leans into character quirks and escalating madness. And for a brief while, the film almost convinces you it might pull it off. 

The early stretches carry an easy rhythm, with humour that feels organic rather than forced, and a central dynamic that is both familiar and quietly amusing.

But that promise begins to fray sooner than expected.

The film's biggest struggle lies in its inability to evolve beyond its central joke. What starts as an amusing character trait, Ramakant's (Rajkummar Rao) obsessive frugality, gradually becomes the only note the narrative knows how to hit. 

Instead of deepening the humour or finding inventive ways to build on it, the writing stretches the gag thinner and thinner, until it begins to feel less like comedy and more like repetition. 

The result is a film that keeps circling the same idea, hoping it will land differently each time, but rarely does.

Tonally, Toaster is even more uncertain. It flirts with dark comedy, dips into crime caper territory, and occasionally veers into outright absurdity, but never quite commits to any of these spaces. 

The transitions feel abrupt rather than seamless, leaving the film caught in a limbo where neither the humour nor the stakes fully register. 

What should have been controlled chaos instead turns into a cluttered narrative, which is weighed down by too many moving parts and too little cohesion.

The second half, in particular, is where the film truly begins to unravel. The pacing slackens, the humour loses its bite, and the screenplay starts to feel like it's scrambling to justify its own twists. 

Scenes stretch longer than they should, jokes arrive a beat too late, and the mounting absurdity lacks the sharpness needed to sustain engagement. 

By the time it inches towards its conclusion, the film feels exhausted by its own excesses.

Rajkummar Rao, as Ramakant, does what he can to hold things together. There's an undeniable watchability to his performance, a familiarity in the way he inhabits these eccentric, middle-class men that makes the character instantly accessible. 

But even he seems constrained by the material, caught in a loop of quirks that feel increasingly recycled. It's less a performance that evolves and more one that repeats, relying on tics we've seen before, without adding anything particularly new.

Sanya Malhotra brings a certain warmth and restraint to her role, even when the writing doesn't give her much to work with. She grounds the film in moments where it desperately needs balance, though her character remains underexplored. 

The supporting cast (Archana Puran Singh and Abhishek Banerjee) is similarly underserved, reduced to fleeting bursts of eccentricity rather than fully realised presences. Their moments amuse in isolation, but rarely contribute to a larger, cohesive whole.

There are flashes: brief, scattered reminders of the film Toaster could have been. A clever line here, an absurd situation there, a moment of genuine comic timing that lands just right. But they arrive too sporadically, never quite enough to offset the growing sense of fatigue.

In the end, Toaster feels like a film that had all the right ingredients but forgot the recipe. It aims for sharp, situational humour but settles for stretched-out gags. It promises chaos but delivers clutter. 

What lingers isn't the laughter it hoped to evoke, but the sense of something that almost worked, before it lost its way.

And much like that unfortunate slice of toast, you're left wishing someone had pulled it out a little earlier.