Toaster (2026) Movie Review: A scene-stealing Archana Puran Singh cannot salvage this lame Mumbai comedy

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You’ve probably seen Rajkumar Rao playing this character in one of the 2 dozen comedies he has done in the last decade. You have probably seen him using the same jazzy hands to express disapproval and making those clueless, innocent sounds to show how troubled his character is. At this point, even he would wake up and play these characters without any prep whatsoever. So, it takes a special kind of filmmaker and script to get him out of the rut and make him genuinely funny again. Vivek Daschaudary is not that filmmaker.

Netflix’s “Toaster” hinges on a fun premise. It follows Ramakant (played by Rao), a stingy middle-aged man whose idea of living is being in a constant state of worry for the money that is going out of his pocket. When he is not thinking about that, he is trying out ways to either save money, earn more money, or get discounts on things that are actually dirt cheap. He lives with his trusting but crime-drama obsessed wife, Shilpa (Sanya Malhotra), in a run-down society full of retired and elderly people – I am sure he dreams of ways to scam one of them to give the couple their inheritance. If not that, he is aggressively trying to pay less rent than other age-appropriate places in Mumbai.

Frankly speaking, he is the kind of man who you would be embarrassed to be friends with, but simply can’t because he is as harmless as a fly, until he isn’t. Things in his life get extremely twisted when his wife decides to go to her guruji’s daughter’s marriage and not give them one of Ramakant’s perfumes from his own shop as a wedding gift. She takes him to an electronics showroom and gets the newlyweds a brand-new toaster. Of course, Ramakant is not amused by this massive spending his wife has just made, but he can only squirm and do jazzy hand gestures before he finds himself in a cross when the wedding itself is cancelled.

Ramkant, being Ramakant, goes out of his way and starts to trace that toaster so that he can return it and get his money back. It leads him to Guruji’s home, then an orphanage run by another greedy woman, played by Farhan Khan, and then back to his society, where the other narrative threads coalesce with this one. Of course, the other narrative thread isn’t half as intriguing as it wants to be. It includes a politician being blackmailed by a druggy named Glen (Abhishek Banerjee) – who happens to be the good-for-nothing son of Ramakant’s landlord, Mrs. D’Souza (Seema Pahwa).

Now, the said Toaster keeps jumping places as chaos ensues, and people start dying around Ramakant. The plot really kicks in when a blackmailing plot involving Ramakant and a supposedly harmless neighbour, Mrs. Pherwani a.k.a Malini (played by Archana Puran Singh), kicks in. A good chunk of the narrative fixates on this dynamic as dead bodies pile up. Nothing in the way of truly thrilling actually happens apart from the constant fear that Ramakant might get into trouble that will jeopardize his relationship with Shilpa.

So, the fun that can be had is merely derived from how Ramakant deals with his fuck up. Even though there’s not much to his character beyond the surface, you are engaged in his obliviousness to the obvious. Trouble finds its way to him because he is adamant about being a miser. “Toaster” would have worked more if it weren’t plot-driven by the many hurdles that come in his way and focused on how his character’s flaws and inhibitions drive it forward. Co-writers Akshat Ghildial, Anagh Mukherjee, and Parveez Shaikh are unable to create a clear pattern that lets Ramakant’s fuck-up feel like it’s the end-of-the-line for him. It also doesn’t help that, beyond the dialogue delivery, there’s nothing even remotely funny about the way things pan out. The gags are over-the-top, but they stop being funny even before one-third of the runtime is covered.

Other than Archana Puran Singh’s scene-stealing, unrecognizable presence, nothing really works for “Toaster,” which ends up being just another lame Mumbai comedy that borrows heavily from the Kunal Khemu school of crime-caper minus the sense of humour of being one.