Toaster Movie Review: Having built his career over a plethora of roles born out of the humdrum of everyday life, Rajkummar Rao now steps into production. Joining him on this ride is wife, Patralekhaa. Hence, it’s no surprise that their debut production venture, Toaster, is an ode to the beauty of ordinariness. But it also has a frosting of deliciously outlandish plot progression with chaos sitting atop like a cherry.
Toaster revolves around – no points for guessing – a toaster. It unfolds over a one-liner story and it’s interesting to see how director Vivek Daschaudary and writers Parveez Shaikh, Akshat Ghildial and Anagh Mukherjee manage to create a joyride – at least in the first half – out of it. The narrative resorts to humour so slice-of-life and ‘categorically middle-class’ (if Maya Sarabhai had to describe it) that you can’t help but cackle every now and then.
So, there’s a delectable whacky idea at the heart of Toaster. And for a while, the film leans into this absurdity with real confidence. It opens with thriller-like tension where we see a sweaty and scared Ramakant digging up a plot to bury a dead body. He asks a certain somebody if burials happen with the body lying on its back or its stomach as he’s only used to seeing dead people get cremated.
The action then moves back a few weeks where we are introduced to Ramakant, a stingy man residing in Mumbai’s Borivali West with his wife, Shilpa. On his morning run, he steals three bananas as that’s a much better way of life than shelling out money. He argues with a woman in the telephone office as they charged Shilpa an added Rs 6 in her monthly bill. His face falls when his landlord, Glen, asks him to pay his share of the autorickshaw fare.
He prefers to visit Glen’s mother, Mrs D’souza, every morning so that he can have his breakfast for free. The final nail in the coffin is when Shilpa coaxes him to accompany her to her martial art trainer’s daughter’s wedding. Ramakant, much against his wife’s wish, ends up buying a toaster worth Rs 4,999 after much haggling.
To make up for this money, he hoards food at the wedding. And when that wedding is called off, he ends up at their home to get his gift back. And that becomes the root cause of all his ordeals. He’s so consumed by his own pettiness that an appliance spirals into crime and existential meltdown. When this toaster gets donated to an orphanage by the bride’s family, he reaches there.
