Diljit Dosanjh plays the titular character, a quirky sleuth with charm and wit. While he brings his trademark likability, the character often slips into caricature, which takes some weight away from the mystery. Diana Penty’s role feels underwritten.

Director Phanindra Narsetti’s 8 Vasantalu possesses attributes rare for most Telugu films lately — ambition, conviction, and a distinct sense of originality. It seeks to be a meditative tale that charts the evolution of a girl through love. Mounted on a dreamy canvas, set in a mist-laden Ooty, narrated across seasons, Nature remains witness to her story, and the film aspires to be poetry in motion.

The protagonist, Shuddhi Ayodhya (Ananthika Sanilkumar), is also a 17-year-old poet who learns martial arts from an ailing guru. The director flips the gender dynamic in an opening sequence reminiscent of a quintessential mass film. Shuddhi puts a brash US-returnee, Varun (Hanu Reddy), in his place after he claims that embroidery is a woman’s domain and martial arts are best left to men.

His sexist remark is met with a sharp thud, the message is clear. Yet, she also reminds him that real strength lies in self-restraint. And, the boy is smitten. But Shuddhi isn’t your average teenager. She’s already the author of a bestselling poetry collection and is on a two-year journey across India to write a book, a plea to the world to appreciate a woman for her virtues rather than her appearance.

Other characters also make their presence felt. Shuddhi’s friend Karthik (Kanna) has a passion for shoe design, much to the disapproval of his orthodox father. Varun, while leading the life his father had only dreamt of, is crumbling under the pressure of fulfilling that wish, securing admission to Berklee. His father takes a loan from a friend to fund his son’s luxurious lifestyle.

Barring an underdeveloped female character named Anita, the director makes a sincere attempt to flesh out his characters’ ideals and inner worlds. While the stories of the men (Karthik, Varun and Sanjay who appears later) are endearing and display some vulnerability, Shuddhi is too idealistic, sorted, and overachieving for a teenager. Almost no setback dents her spirit.

While the plot has all the ingredients of a sweeping romance told through the lens of a woman who is worthy of admiration, the storytelling lacks grounding, and the impact is diluted by self-indulgent dialogue. Every event becomes an excuse to reinforce Shuddhi’s unwavering spirit, a pursuit that grows tiring after a point.

It’s hard not to appreciate the pre-interval sequence where Shuddhi speaks of how her mother raised her like a queen, and why she deserves to be treated with dignity (in a breakup). Moments later, at a funeral, she questions the patriarchy, pointing out the irony of a woman, capable of giving birth, being barred from performing final rites.

Pertinent points are raised throughout the film, but they often land flat cinematically. The film finds its footing in a striking action sequence in Varanasi, where Shuddhi unshackles the beast within. All hell breaks loose as the motifs of a tigress and Durga roar to life. Her profound reflections at the Taj Mahal are potent in thought, but their impact is dulled by excess dialogue.

Shuddhi’s love stories with Varun and the Telugu author Sanjay (Ravi Duggirala) have interesting parallels. However, with Sanjay, the director goes overboard in validating his ideas and belief systems.

The metafictional subplot around Sanjay’s novel Rani Malini (about a prostitute who reclaims her agency) is ideologically compelling but disrupts the film’s momentum. The narrative eventually regains some lost ground with Sanjay’s poignant backstory, with a surprise twist, offering a nostalgic nod to the era of love letters and providing insight into the title.

Amid all the tall standards the protagonist sets for herself, it’s difficult to imagine why she would entertain her mother’s idea to marry into a wealthy family, albeit reluctantly. Despite its shortcomings, 8 Vasantalu isn’t a lazy effort. It has a surreal visual texture (cinematography by Vishwanath Reddy) and a story that has a lot to unpack; just that the balance doesn’t come through effectively.

For instance, the parallel shots of Varun and Shuddhi spending sleepless nights as they come to terms with their feelings for each other are a sight to behold. The imagery of a fallen rose petal, symbolising how love breaks and heals Shuddhi, is quietly poignant. Even the title credits, where her journey is shown in reverse, linger long after the film ends.

Much like the director’s earlier film Manu, it doesn’t know where to stop. While his debut effort was way more cinematically rich, the bloated writing in 8 Vasantalu, where the conversations sound like discourses, dents the overall impact.

Conceptually, the film’s characters, at times, feel like figments of the writer’s imagination rather than beings of flesh and blood, ones we struggle to identify with. Though the little details that complete their world are impressive, more effort could have gone into integrating them with the narrative seamlessly. Even the visuals of Ooty, Kashmir, get a tad too touristy.

Ananthika Sanilkumar gracefully embodies the fiery spirit that Shuddhi is, making every attempt to internalise her resilience and trauma. Hanu Reddy, as the hopelessly lovestruck teenager, has a raw, captivating screen presence. Ravi Duggirala’s character graph is impressive, though his performance has scope for improvement. Kanna Pasunoori is a fine find, and Sanjana Hardageri shows promise in an underwrought part.

It’s surprising that a love story with a plethora of emotions has only two songs, composed by Hesham Abdul Wahab, as part of its album. ‘Parichayamila’, sung by K. S. Chitra, is a melody for the ages. The vibrant, varied costumes, in sync with the film’s mood, are another high point.

Despite its merits, 8 Vasantalu is like a poem that’s too conscious of its style, overstuffed at times, right in its intent but lacking in warmth.

Published – June 20, 2025 03:52 pm IST

It’s appropriate that Hiroshi Sakurazaka‘s light novel All You Need Is Kill, a story about trying something again and changing just a little bit each time, is getting a repeat adaptation. But it would be a disservice to the new film by Kenichiro Akimoto to call it the inverse of the Tom Cruise-starring Edge of Tomorrow (or is it Live. Die. Repeat?). This take, from a screenplay by Yuichiro Kido, is from the perspective of Rita instead of Keiji (or Cage, in the other film) – but they’re very different characters here.

Though there is overlap with the live-action adaptation (understandable, given the shared source material)—Rita’s perspective here is the difference-maker, as her story becomes more about her self-imposed isolation and inability to connect with people, a lingering symptom of an undisclosed childhood trauma. “I’ve been submerged ever since then,” Rita reflects at the film’s opening as she drives out into the desert, fleeing from something we can’t see. Red roots suddenly sprout from a portal and encircle the earth—Rita only smiles in response.

We learn the reasons behind this response as the film goes on, but the short of it is that she’s trapped even before the time loop begins; if anything that cycle gives her the opportunity to change herself—she has to change in order to survive, and fight til the next day. The writing is heavy handed in the delivery of this messaging, as is some of the imagery—showing her literally submerged in water in representation of the weight of her isolation. Her emotional journey
throughout the film is the anchor for All You Need Is Kill, even as it makes some head-scratching choices in the last moments.

For now, though, she’s a worker charged with disassembling the massive alien plant creature Darol branch by branch (not entirely far off the premises of Pacific Rim or Kaiju No. 8). Despite the funky mech suit, it’s not a military operation however, and so she goes through the same arc of floundering panic to assured combat prowess as Tom Cruise‘s character.

That training through repetition earned comparisons with video game structure for Edge of Tomorrow, but All You Need Is Kill doubles down—going as far as having a secondary character looking at a “Continue?” screen upon each death, or saying “it’s like a video game!” Such didacticism is something that happens frequently across anime, but it feels especially insulting here, when it’s so easy to infer: the characters have continual power-ups to their suit and weapons, for one.

Still, like it’s live action sibling, All You Need Is Kill is at its most pleasurable when it uses this checkpoint conceit as a prompt to play with editing, like cutting between Rita’s steps occurring in different resets, speeding up with each cut as she becomes more confident. Another distinction from the live-action film is that it adds another rule regarding the deaths and resets, which won’t be detailed here.

The little things add up to a film which feels worth seeing in spite of the similarities which are there. It’s also set apart by a hallucinatory style—not just in the different ways in which Akimoto presents the interaction between the alien threat and Rita’s mind, but also how the earth has mutated in response to their arrival. The colors are like looking at oil in water, while the 3D animation is dressed up with cel-shading and flattened, shadowless textures as well as scratchy linework, not
far off the art style embraced by the other Studio 4*C film shown at Annecy Festival the same week, ChaO, or perhaps Taiyo Matsumoto and Shinji Kimura‘s design work on Tekkonkinkreet and its film adaptation (another Studio 4*C film – a pattern emerges).

But even as its playfulness with editing and 3D camerawork and scene-blocking persists, Akimoto’s film keeps drifting back into less interesting choices as the film goes on, both in the story choices and even in the music. The soundtrack gradually abandons the eerie and sparse electronic notes of its early acts to more anonymous orchestral compositions.

As for the story itself, the film’s point isn’t entirely lost, but it undermines itself with the execution of some of its ideas. While this film’s take on character of Keiji is a fun subversion of his image both on page and on screen, the character gets put into a position which ultimately becomes a hijacking of Rita’s arc at the last possible moment, taking a vital choice to out of her hands. In addition, a decision made by one of the characters is undone simply because it requires too many steps, the
impact of the moment is diffused because of how much it takes to get to this point, and by the time it does, there’s no feeling left in it. It’s a shame that a film making such idiosyncratic choices in its merging of 3D and 2D visual languages in animation keeps falling into rather predictable patterns, because for the most part, it’s exciting to watch. Maybe someone will nail it on the next go-around.