V Movie Review: It Keeps Running Into One Blind Lane After Another

Director: Mohana Krishna Indraganti

Telugu cinema is still imprisoned in a time warp. Melodramatically theatrical and prone to exaggerated performances and narrating a story through long discourses and not visuals, it woefully lacks modern cinematic language. Amazon Prime Video’s latest offering, V, helmed and written by Mohana Krishna Indraganti, calls itself a thriller with injustice and anger and revenge packed into it.

But a lot of the film’s run time of 140 minutes is directed towards two love stories – one between Deputy Commissioner of Police, Adithya (Sudheer Babu) and Apoorva Ramanujam (Nivetha Thomas) as well as between Vishnu (the movie’s title comes from the V in the name) and Saheba (Aditi Rao Hydari). These are so terribly digressing.

In one of the first scenes, we see a dashing and debonair Adithya in a bar drinking, when Apoorva (who is researching for a psychological thriller) joins him, befriends him. “You are hot”, he tells her! Unbelievable for a cop to be saying this in the era of #MeToo! Well, she does not take offence! And this is the beginning of a romance between the two with her helping him in his effort to crack the case of a serial killer, called Vishnu. The plot then runs into one blind lane after another.