Ananthika Sanilkumar, drama, Hanu Reddy, India, Kanna Pasunoori, movies, Phanindra Narsetti, Ravi Theja Duggirala, reviews, Sanjana Hardageri, Sumant Nitturkar
June 21, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Phanindra Narsetti
Telugu with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in India, from 2013 to 2021, the dramatic film “8 Vasantalu” features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A young author and martial arts enthusiast goes through various ups and downs in her love life.
Culture Audience: “8 Vasantalu” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and soap opera-styled dramas that are cloying and lack imagination.
“8 Vasantalu” makes an effort to be an epic love story, but the movie’s editing and narrative are too choppy. Most of this drama is dreadfully boring. “8 Vasantalu” jumps around from storyline to storyline, leaving many questions unanswered. The movie is 135 minutes long but still manages to be trite and shallow in many areas.
Written and directed by Phanindra Narsetti, “8 Vasantalu” (which means “8 Springs” in Telugu) takes place in India from 2013 to 2021. However, the characters in the movie don’t look like they’ve aged during this eight-year span. It’s one of many things in “8 Vasantalu” that look too phony.
The protagonist of “8 Vasantalu” is Shuddhi Ayodhya (played by Ananthika Sanilkumar), an opinionated and independent woman who goes from ages 19 to 27 in the story. Shuddhi lives in a middle-class household with her widowed mother in Ooty, India. It’s shown in the beginning of the movie that at the age of 19, Shuddhi is not only a successful author—her first book is an inspirational collection of poetry called “RAYS (Rise Above Your Situation)” —but she’s also very talented in martial arts. Shiddhu is also very different from her peers because she doesn’t want to have a cell phone and she doesn’t want to be on social media.
There’s no backstory on how Shiddhu developed these skills. She’s never shown struggling to get her first book published or spending years in martial arts training. Shuddhi is depicted as exceptional without showing any of the real work it takes to get the type of recognition that she gets. The only obstacles that Shuddhi comes up against have to do with sexism, but “8 Vasantalu” is so ploddingly predictable, she’s able to easily defeat her opponents and critics.
An early scene in the movie takes place in a co-educational martial arts dojo, where the students are under the age of 18 and are mostly male. The dojo instructor is an arrogant and wealthy guy in his late teens named Varun (played by Hanu Reddy), who has a sexist attitude about martial arts. Varun announces to everyone in the class: “Martial arts is a man thing,” even though he’s teaching male and female students.
Shuddhi’s best friend Anita (played by Sanjana Hardageri) is an assistant in the class. Anita tells Varun that he’s wrong about martial arts only being for men, and she mentions that her friend Shuddhi can prove Varun that he’s wrong about this belief. And the next thing you know, Shuddhi walks into the room and proceeds to challenge Varun to a martial arts fight. Shuddhi wins, of course.
Varun is embarrassed but he’s also intrigued by Shuddhi. He thinks her beauty and confidence are very attractive. The next few times that Varun sees Shuddhi in public places, he flirts with her, but she makes it clear that she’s not really interested in dating him. Shuddhi playing “hard to get” makes Varun want her even more.
Shuddhi’s mother encourages Shuddhi to be herself, but she also expects Shuddhi to make practical decisions on who to date and marry. Not surprisingly, Shuddhi’s mother thinks Shuddhi should marry into a wealthy family if given the chance. Shuddhi wants to marry for love, regardless of the caste of her future husband.
Shuddhi doesn’t say the word “feminist” out loud, but she thinks and acts like a feminist. There’s a scene in the movie where she says, “I don’t want people to call me beautiful.” She adds that she would rather be complimented for being hard-working and brave. Shuddhi has already thought of the title of her next book: “The Goddess in You.”
One of the other problems in “8 Vasantalu” is there is no information on who inspired Shuddhi to become a writer. There’s no mention of when she started writing. She’s never shown interacting with any book agents or anyone from the company where she has a book publishing deal. The movie barely has any scenes of her writing after she becomes a published author because so much of the story is about Shiddhu’s issues in her love life.
As for Shuddhi’s fame as an author, “8 Vasantalu” has some poorly written scenes that are dropped in, with no meaningful follow-up. There’s a scene where a middle-aged man introduces himself to Shiddhu and tells her that “RAYS” helped him cope with his grief after his wife died. Shiddhu tells him that she wrote the book to cope with the death of her father, who died while in combat as a sniper in the Indian military.
The middle-aged fan then gives Shiddhu a diamond ring from famed jewelry company Tiffany. No one in the movie comments on Shiddhu getting this extravagant gift from a stranger. In real life, this type of gift from a middle-aged stranger to a 19-year-old would be considered unusual at best and creepy at worst and would definitely be talked about under these circumstances. It’s an example of the movie’s disconnect from reality that no one in the movie talks about this gift.
As for Shiddhu’s martial arts training, she has an instructor she calls Master, who is first seen in the story as being in a hospital with a terminal illness. He tells her doesn’t want to die without teaching her how to be a black belt in karate first. Later, some flashback scenes show Shiddhu training with Master, but they are very superficial montage scenes. The movie clumsily handles the storyline for Master and his terminal illness because it’s introduced abruptly and then not seen or mentioned again for a long stretch of the movie until it abruptly comes back into the story.
There’s also a lot of screen time given to Varun’s personal drama. Varun lives with his parents, who have various properties in multiple countries, including the United States, where Varun was living for several years in Texas. Varun and his parents are temporarily in India for about a year because Varun’s businessman father (played by Sumant Nitturkar) has some business dealings that he has to handle in person.
Varun has his own issues with family expectations. He’s the lead singer and multi-instrumentalist for a band called Nostalgia, which plays a combination of pop music and traditional Indian music. Anita is a guitarist in the band. A young man named Karthik (played by Kanna Pasunoori), who’s a mutual friend of Shiddhu and Anita, takes Shiddhu to see Nostalgia perform. Hoping to impress Shiddhu (who is standing in the front row), Varun sings a ballad directly to her and says it’s dedicated to “someone special in the audience.”
Varun has his own issues with family expectations. Varun’s father used to be a musician who wanted to go to the prestigious Berklee College of Music but didn’t get the opportunity. Varun’s father is putting Varun under enormous pressure to become a Berklee student. A significant part of the movie is about Varun waiting to find out whether or not he was accepted into Berklee.
Varun eventually tells Shiddhu that he’s sorry for how he was disrespectful to her during the first time they met in the dojo. Slowly but surely, Shiddhu warms up to Varun, who pursues her with persistence. They begin dating and eventually they declare their love for each other. Shiddhu and Vaun meet up every Sunday. The movie has a montage of their dates in the first two or three months of their romance.
There are complications, of course. Varun doesn’t want his parents to know that he’s dating Shiddhu because she comes from a lower caste, and he wants his parents to think that he’s focused on his aspiring music career. When he goes on dates with Shiddhu, Varun lies to his parents by saying that he’s taking music lessons in Chennai.
If you take into account Varun’s personality flaws and dishonesty, it can be easy to determine that Varun is the type of suitor who is more in love with pursuing Shiddhu because she’s a challenge or “forbidden” rather than having feelings of true love for Shiddhu. Varun can be charming and attentive though. Eventually, the relationship between Varum and Shiddhu is put to a major test.
“8 Vasantalu” has frustrating disconnects in the story that don’t make any sense. Varun and Shiddhu supposedly have this passionate love affair, but they don’t talk about what they want to do about their relationship if Varun gets accepted into Berklee. Early on in the relationship, Varun said that he and his parents were temporarily living in India, and they would eventually move back to the United States. However, Shiddhu acts like Varun will permanently stay in India because of her.
Most of “8 Vasantalu” is about the ups and downs in the relationship between Shidhhu and Varum. But there’s a bizarre sequence where all of a sudden, Shiddhu becomes an action hero who has to fight her way out of a kidnapping. It’s as if “8 Vasantalu” had to remind viewers that Shiddhu knows martial arts. The tonal shift is very mishandled.
“8 Vasantalu” also goes off on a tangent with a developing romance between Anita and Karthik. But then, that storyline goes away for a long stretch and is never adequately addressed again. Later in the movie, there’s a writer named Sanjay (played by Ravi Theja Duggirala) who shows up and has a backstory that is explained in a very long exposition-dump monologue that’s crammed in yet another awkwardly filmed sequence.
The performances in “8 Vasantalu” are adequate, with Sanilkumar doing her best to keep up with all the personality shifts that Shiddhu is supposed to have in the story. Is Shiddhu an outspoken and courageous feminist who wants to prove herself by having a career in a male-dominated field? Or is she a weepy co-dependent who wants to follow her boyfriend and make decisions about her life based on where her boyfriend wants to live? In “8 Vasatalu,” Shiddhu is presented as both of these types of very different women, which means that by the end of the movie, viewers won’t really feel like they know Shiddhu at all because she doesn’t really know herself.
Mythri Movie Makers released “8 Vasantalu” in select U.S. cinemas and in India on June 20, 2025.