The Paradise (2026) · ⭐ (1/5)

Dir. Srikanth Odela · Starring Nani, Mohan Babu, Kayadu Lohar, Sonali Kulkarni, Raghav Juyal · 173 min · Telugu

Released in theatres 24 September 2026

*

The setup: Secunderabad, the 1980s. A slum called Paradise is home to the Savaari, a tribe the state has quietly decided does not exist — no citizenship papers, no vote, no recourse. Jadal (Nani) comes home from prison to find his mother Sammakka (Sonali Kulkarni) still the only person standing up to Shikanja Malik (Mohan Babu), the landlord who owns the ground they live on and everything they grow on it. Shikanja's son Vikram (Raghav Juyal) has ambitions beyond his father's extortion — he wants the slum cleared as a launchpad into politics. Jadal, freshly radicalised and unnaturally good at violence, sets himself against both. Somewhere in the middle is Subbu (Kayadu Lohar), who is mostly required to look worried while the camera does unkind things to her.

The verdict: one of the worst Telugu films of the year, and the most expensive one to be this empty. The Paradise cost an estimated ₹150–200 crore and runs 173 minutes — and after all of that money and all of that time, it has no idea what it is about. It wants to be a cry against a real injustice, the denial of citizenship to denotified tribes, and it wants to be a blood-soaked Mad Max-adjacent spectacle, and it never notices that those two ambitions cancel each other out. When you use a people's actual dispossession as set dressing for a body count, you have not made a political film. You have made a very expensive snuff cartoon with a social conscience painted on the poster.

What genuinely works: Nani. He has never physically committed to a role like this before, and he is the reason the film is watchable at all in stretches — lean, feral, genuinely imposing in the fight choreography. CH Sai's cinematography gives the slum a burnt, ochre, sun-cracked texture that sticks with you, and Anirudh Ravichander's score does a lot of heavy lifting in scenes that have nothing underneath them. The production design sells 1980s Secunderabad convincingly. On a purely technical level, this is a well-made film. That is also the problem, and it is the whole problem: craft this good applied to a script this bad is not a near-miss, it is an alibi. Technical polish on a film with no idea what it is about does not earn it credit — it makes the emptiness look deliberate.

What sinks it: the screenplay, which by the time you count screenplay, additional screenplay and dialogue credits carries nine names, and reads exactly like it. It is a film assembled from set pieces rather than written toward anything. Characters are introduced, given a single trait and a grudge, and then parked until the next fight. Sonali Kulkarni's Sammakka is meant to be the moral spine and the mother-son bond is meant to be the heart — and it simply is not there. The film keeps telling you Jadal loves his mother; it never once earns it. Easwari Rao and Tanikella Bharani are good actors given nothing to hold.

And the violence is not the point — that is what makes it indefensible. A brutal film can be a serious film. Dasara, Odela's own debut with Nani, was brutal and meant it. Here the gore is decorative, metronomic and eventually numbing: by the second hour another throat being opened lands with the emotional force of a loading screen. Once violence stops meaning anything, a 173-minute film built almost entirely out of it has nothing left to offer. The Keerthy Suresh item number and the way the camera treats Kayadu Lohar's character sit badly next to a story nominally about dignity — you cannot demand respect for your characters on one reel and strip it from them on the next.

Nobody was fooled. On Rotten Tomatoes, 0% of 11 critics' reviews are positive, averaging 3.7/10 — one of the most comprehensively rejected Telugu wide releases in memory. Neeshita Nyayapati of Hindustan Times gave it 1/5 and wished the audience had been given better. Sreeju Sudhakaran of Rediff, also 1/5, called it "a mind-numbingly senseless, hellish cycle of violence, gore, and torture porn." Suresh Kavirayani of Cinema Express gave 2/5 and landed the best line of the lot: "Paradise Biryani is very famous in Hyderabad, but this Paradise leaves you disappointed." The kindest mainstream verdict, 3/5 from Times of India, still warned that the relentless pacing and violence would not work for most viewers.

The numbers tell the same story. It opened to ₹76.9 crore worldwide on day one — the biggest opening of Nani's career — and then fell off a cliff, reaching about ₹169 crore by day thirteen against a budget of ₹150–200 crore before marketing. A record opener that does not recover its cost is not a hit; it is the clearest possible signal that the audience came for the star and told their friends not to bother.

Bottom line: one committed performance and a beautiful-looking frame, wrapped around 173 minutes of noise that mistakes volume for meaning and blood for stakes. A film does not get credit for the money spent on it. Nani deserves a better reunion with the director who gave him Dasara, and the Savaari, whose story this borrows, deserved a film that took them seriously instead of using them. ⭐ — watch Dasara again instead.