Even though Saripodhaa Sanivaaram is billed as an action thriller, there are only a handful of sequences where the action fully flourishes on screen. Vivek Athreya channels his most exuberant self for these bits, going all out with his visual style. Most of them are executed with classic hero elevation swagger, but two particularly stand out. While one grabs your attention with its extraordinary shot-taking and lighting, it’s the other one, staged at a crowded pub, that truly gives you a thrilling high. It comes as a brilliant pay-off to an earlier scene in the film. As our protagonist Surya (Nani) finally goes to confront the bad guy, the anticipation of him holding back at first, then going after him, and the reason behind it, gives this action-packed moment its true emotional punch, and makes it satisfying.

Vivek Athreya has a clear vision with the latest Nani-starrer—pushing the envelope for a quintessential action movie while playing within the conventional terrain—and his ambition is visible in almost every decision he makes here, as a writer and a director.

Director: Vivek Athreya

Cast: Nani, Priyanka Mohan, SJ Suryah, Murali Sharma, Sai Kumar, Abhirami

There are so many moments and small touches where it’s evident that Vivek is going for a deliberately off-beat mood, chasing the unexpected. The title card doesn’t stay on screen for long. For the classic hero intro scene, there is something unheroic about Nani’s appearance that offsets the elevation moment. The line that’s been extensively used for the promotions - Pothaaru, Motham Pothaaru (Gone.. Everyone will be gone) is used in a hilariously subversive context in the film. When an old and wise constable mentions the people of Sokulapalem, Vivek suddenly cuts to an enthralling montage of the resilient faces (With fabulous cinematography by Murali G).

Vivek also divides his film into chapters, informing his viewers that of the neat structure in his head that will probably make it easier for the audience to anticipate and prepare for the mood shifts. Vivek is clearly trying his best to keep things interesting while operating within a familiar ground, and that playfulness is such an underrated skill in a filmmaker.

Infact, at various points, Saripodhaa Sanivaaram displays traits of a superhero movie. At its core, it remains a quintessential hero vs villain movie, a vigilante tale. The film also works amusingly well as an antithetical counterpart to KGF, another movie whose premise lies on the son's promise to his mother. Philosophically too, there are plenty of interesting ideas that are touched upon. I was hoping for more exploration on the two sides of anger, the channelled and the misplaced, that manifest in our hero and villain, respectively).

There are several moments where the film promises to entirely venture into comic book-like territory. This mood is most evident in the way Vivek writes the scenes between Dayanand (SJ Suryah) and Kurmanand (Murali Sharma). Even when things go comically disarray from Dayanand’s perspective, the director never lets us forget the evil that lurks behind the goofiness, releasing the tension in a great, unexpected moment of clinical violence. This decision to give a layering to the standard villain figure works wonderfully.

In fact, such layering is lent to many other writing choices. There is a poignant subplot about a family facing domestic violence, there is another promise waiting to be made from an expecting mother. The film has a lot of these heavy, emotional elements embedded throughout its genre-driven narrative. There is nothing too simple here, not even the fear residing in the people of Sokulapolem, which is laden with trauma after years of prejudice, and the inability to break free of their condition (until Surya arrives, that is).

The world of Sokulapalem is a crucial element here, and Vivek displays an incredible talent for world-building with a great visual economy. If Ante Sundaraniki was an intimate story about two people and their families, Saripodhaa Sanivaaram almost feels like an epic, considering how the action of its two leading men changes the fate of an entire neighbourhood (Special mention to Jakes Bejoy who delivers a rousing background score in perfect sync with the film’s scale). The first half is a fabulous set-up of this universe, and the much-awaited payoff, which shows you how the worlds of Surya and Dayanand, and their anger, collide.

At the same time, the only thread that doesn’t work is the transformation of the Sokulapalem people, after the vigilante’s arrival—and that plays a major role in how the narrative of Saripodhaa Sanivaaram culminates. Vivek tries to pack in a lot in the second half, especially the final 40 minutes, and the result is not particularly seamless.

Also, like in all his previous films, Athreya writes his screenplay in a way where both he and his characters deliberately conceal key bits of information from the viewers for long stretches, and yet the revelation unfolds in such a manner that doesn’t feel gimmicky or manipulative. Early in the film, we see Surya’s father (a highly likeable Sai Kumar) sharing his woes with a therapist, only to reveal that his reasons for visiting the therapist are far more grave. Charulatha (Priyanka Mohan bringing great vulnerability to her part) inadvertently keeps her share of secrets from Surya. Surya, of course, leads a double life as a calm insurance agent and a raging ball of fury that erupts only once a week.

But the film’s best-written and the funniest moment arrives, ironically, in the intro scene for our antagonist CI Dayanand (SJ Suryah). What would have been a standard bad-guy-struts-his-menace scene becomes a thrilling concoction of humour and thrill. As Dayanand interrogates a man he has abducted, asking him about his son and who he loves more, the conversation leads to a rollicking revelation about Dayanand himself, his childhood, and his baggage from the past. SJ Suryah knocks it out of the park in the scene, as he does in the rest of the film — and it also takes brilliant writing to conceive a moment like this.

Saripodhaa Sanivaaram only further cements that Vivek Athreya is one of the most exciting and gifted writers of contemporary Telugu cinema, and there couldn’t have been a better filmmaker than him to attempt a reinvention of the quintessential Telugu action movie.