Why I am being so generous with my interpretation of the film is because it has an odd, subtle hand when talking about things like caste. It wants us to peek into the film, really pay attention, to figure out who is upper caste and who is lower. Suri and Vennela are from the same caste. Dharani, it is implied, is from a lower caste. The bar has a separate entrance for people like him. This is shown, not discussed. It must be yanked out of the film.
Dharani is a man whose courage and bravery are kindled only by alcohol. This he learned from his grandmother. When, as a child, he asks her, why she drinks, she replies mournfully, for courage. Alcoholism, like most things in the film, is given a sudden, jerking arc. As this film steadies us into its world, the film goes so far as to call it tradition. In a charming song after NTR bans alcohol — an elegy, really — we are told about how mutton sales dropped and marriages and funerals are both without life. The film depicts alcohol as valorous. There is a creeping sense that the central tragedy that keeps the film afloat would not have happened had Dharani been drunk. Sobriety is a vice in this world.
But soon, this flips in an unconvincing epilogue. As though the film was worried about its posture being one promoting alcoholism, and so it overcorrected in the only way it knows — throwing dialogues at a problem. These overcorrections are signs of a worried writer who isn’t confident about his world, worldview, audience, and craft. There is a shamelessness that it refuses to lean into. Even the way Dasara treats Keerthy Suresh’s character feels apologetic, giving her a patch of dialogue to explain why the film is so cruel to her.
The film unsteadily grapples with Nani’s heroism. In one scene he takes a scythe right out of the fire it is being baked in, but first wraps cloth around his hand before touching it, so he doesn’t get burned. This hero has his limits. Yet the climax is one of unkempt bravado, of one man pummelling a mountain of men; of him emerging from fire, untouched by its flames. A character asks in Dasara, “Are our lives greater than myths?” The film answers, shiftily, both yes and no, and I wish it had made a choice, one that it stuck to; one that it could put the full force of its cinematic might behind.