Toilet: Ek Prem Katha review: An attempt to sidle up to the govt?

Toilet: Ek Prem Katha looks less like a sincere effort to deconstruct and depict a complex reality

The most interesting – and the most heartening – bit about Akshay Kumar’s latest, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, is that it’s devoid of a villain. We don’t need one, the film suggests at one point, for we’ve been letdown by our people’s insistence on “sabhyata (civility)” and “sanskriti (culture)”. It’s an argument that merits some attention, more so because it comes in a Kumar film, which is usually known for its nationalist fervour. It’s also a rare instance of a Hindi film looking inwards, telling us that instead of holding someone else responsible for the quandary we find ourselves in,