8 Vasantalu review: A potentially stunning drama lost in its own vanity

There are films that stumble quietly. Then there are those that trip over their own need to look profound and take the whole theatre down with them. 8 Vasantalu, written and directed by Phanindra Narsetti, falls squarely in the latter category. It is a film that does not whisper its emotions but stage-acts them, arms flailing, nose flaring, voice trembling, all in the service of what it believes is poetry. 

Phanindra Narsetti, the once-promising short filmmaker who gained acclaim through independent films like Madhuram and Backspace, returns with a film so drenched in ambitious depth that it feels less like cinema and more like a poetry competition narrated through aesthetic visuals. Somewhere between self-help slogans and tear-streaked monologues, the soul it’s trying so hard to showcase becomes a blur.

Director: Phanindra Narsetti

Cast: Ananthika Sanilkumar, Ravi Theja Duggirala, Kanna Pasunoori, Hanu Reddy

The story follows Shuddi Ayodhya (Ananthika Sanilkumar), a young martial artist and self-help author who is introduced as someone strong, sorted and enlightened. At 17, she writes a book called “RAYS — Rise Above Your Sorrows,” and is described as a beacon of wisdom. Her first love, Varun (Hanu Reddy), exits midway, leaving her heartbroken. Enter writer Sanjay (Ravi Teja Duggirala), with whom she gets another shot at affection. But the film is less interested in what happens and more in what can be said about what happens in overly polished Telugu.

Vishwanath Reddy’s cinematography is exquisite. Every frame of 8 Vasantalu is bathed in a painter’s eye for light and landscape. Ooty’s cool serenity, Kashmir’s ethereal fall season, even mundane rooms are turned into dreamscapes. If someone told me they watched the film on mute just to bask in its visuals, I’d understand. Similarly, editor Shashank Mali deserves a salute for somehow finding rhythm in this theatrical mush, his montages pulse with a kind of desperate urgency that almost convinces you something emotional is happening.

But here’s the problem, the dialogue in 8 Vasantalu is like a philosophy major doing theatre warm-ups. Every character seems to have swallowed a poetry manual and now suffers from an allergic reaction to conversational realism. This is a film where the characters don’t speak so much as recite. Every line arrives dressed for an open mic night. Dialogues like “I was in a mental Hiroshima” or “First love is only a dasha (phase), not a disha (direction)” intended to pierce your soul, but they ended up making the crowd erupt in unintentional laughter.

When a film refuses to trust silence or simplicity, it loses intimacy. At one point, I counted three scenes in a row where someone had a single tear roll dramatically down their cheek while they flare their nostrils and over-pronounce words. The issue is not the melodrama but the artificiality. People cry in real life, yes. But do they really do it with a lighting cue while delivering an intelligent line? Sometimes, letting a moment be is also beautiful. For instance, a scene where Shuddi, unable to express her pain after a heartbreak, once cries in her shower and then in the next scene, says to her master, “I thought why cry in instalments, I let it all out.” 

Ananthika Sanilkumar has solid screen presence and undeniable grace. She looks like she belongs in these cinematic frames. Hanu Reddy too has a youthful magnetism. Ravi Theja Duggirala over-does his part but then it’s the film, not the actor. All the actors are directed to perform not as people, but as devices. Their gestures are choreographed, their pain scripted with a theatricality that’s more exhausting than empathetic. This is perhaps a side-effect of a writer obsessed with his perception of the world.

Despite all these flaws, the more indigestible one is the film’s lack of conflict. Shuddi Ayodhya is not a character you discover, she’s a template you’re told to worship. It’s hard to root for someone who seems to have emerged from a LinkedIn post titled “10 Habits of Highly Powerful Women.” She is always right, always powerful, always two steps ahead of the world and her lovers. The result? No growth. No arc. No stakes. There is nothing internal about her, she is just a one-dimensional being who floats from scene to scene, not living through pain but sermonising about it. If your protagonist already has all the answers in the world, why should we follow her journey of eight years? Even during her breakup, she just lectures her ex about dignity in polished prose. It's admirable, maybe even inspiring for a self-help reel, but dramatically dead.

And yet, somewhere buried under all the excess, there’s a film trying to breathe. Director Phanindra Narsetti may be overindulgent, but he understands moments. There are glimpses of real emotion, especially in how he structures certain montages. He knows how to build atmosphere and how to deliver a cinematic high especially towards that climax where eight years are summed and it lands perfectly. The Varanasi fight sequence is one of the best-edited and charged action scenes I have seen in recent times. Even the opening sequence has a magical trance to it. If only he didn’t try so hard to prove his cinematic prowess.

Another saving grace, apart from the visuals, is Heshaam Abdul Wahab’s music, which flows through the film like a soul trying to escape its own script. There are stretches where you stop listening to what the characters are saying and just ride the music. It’s telling that the most moving moments are those where no one is speaking.

Ultimately, 8 Vasantalu is the kind of film that wants you to believe it has all the answers to pain, love, loss, and existence. But instead of exploring these ideas, it reads them aloud from a diary of borrowed thoughts. This is not a straight-up bad film. It’s an over-written one that desperately wants to matter. In trying to sound wise every second, it forgets to be human even for a minute. If only the film trusted its visual storytelling more, this could have been the classic love story we have been craving for in Telugu cinema for a decade now.