The Paradise review: Nani is a saviour in frustrating film that refuses to be saved

The Paradise movie review: Directed by Srikanth Odela and starring Nani, Mohan Babu, and Sonali Kulkarni, The Paradise is so fragmented that it struggles to establish cohesion and continuity and, most importantly, lacks a substantial story to hold it together.

In Short

• Nani shifts to action with The Paradise, his biggest film so far
• It's a story of oppressed tribe fighting brutal ruler Malik post-Independence
• The film struggles with fragmented narrative and excessive violence

Nani, the Natural Star and one of Telugu cinema’s most relatable, family-friendly heroes, has been steadily pivoting towards action-heavy films over the past few years. His latest outing, The Paradise, is his biggest yet in terms of scale and action. But does Nani’s second collaboration with director Srikanth Odela work as well as their first? Can The Paradise take the actor and filmmaker to the next league? What works, what doesn’t, and what really goes wrong? Let’s find out.

Jadal (Nani) and his mother Shamakka (Sonali Kulkarni) belong to a marginalised tribe in post-Independence Secunderabad. But freedom remains a distant dream for them and the entire community, which is ruled, oppressed and brutalised by Malik (Mohan Babu). The tribe has been stripped of its identity and forced to survive in inhuman conditions, with little food, no steady means of livelihood and no freedom.

Given the circumstances into which Jadal is born, the community sees him as someone who could eventually save them from years of oppression and exploitation. And, as with most stories centred on a saviour, there comes a point when Jadal discovers his purpose and chooses to fight for his people.

What led him to that moment? What drives Malik’s oppression? How does Jadal take on Malik, and what kind of justice can he secure for his tribe? These questions form the crux of Srikanth Odela’s The Paradise.

Director Srikanth Odela’s The Paradise begins with a prologue before unfolding across several chapters. The chapters come with elaborate names, such as Womb of Scars, Butterfly and Womb of War. While the chapter structure is presumably intended to give the sprawling story a clear shape, it instead makes the film feel fragmented and lacking in cohesion. In retrospect, The Paradise could perhaps have benefited from a sharper edit.

The Paradise starts with a promising premise about an oppressed tribe living under Malik’s brutal rule, where even pregnant women are not spared. The opening sequences make it clear that this is not the usual Nani film. Unfortunately, what begins as a potentially compelling story soon gets buried under excessive violence, gore and an increasingly muddled execution. The film appears to have plenty to say about oppression and power, but its storytelling rarely knows how to say it effectively.

Nani’s Jadal has his legitimacy questioned when he is in his early teens. Malik humiliates him in front of his mother, publicly branding her a whore. The sequence lays the foundation for everything that follows. Jadal’s rage is fuelled by this humiliation, and it consumes almost half his life. It is an interesting character arc for a protagonist, but Odela repeatedly undercuts it by drowning the narrative in graphic, seemingly mindless violence. After a point, The Paradise begins to veer into torture porn, with pregnant women repeatedly subjected to brutality and even newborn babies not being spared.

Jadal grows up in a dumpyard-like slum, where Malik and his family’s reign ensures that no one from the tribe gets to live with dignity. This is where The Paradise establishes feudalism as its central theme. But Jadal’s journey soon expands beyond personal revenge: he is expected to save the entire tribe. The film then leans into familiar saviour tropes before introducing a legal angle that further complicates the community’s fight. Suddenly, The Paradise becomes a story about the oppressed taking on the system.

The problem is that the film keeps adding themes without giving any of them enough room to breathe. The Paradise has its foot in too many worlds — feudalism, oppression, revenge, saviourism and the fight against the system — but rarely does justice to any one of them.

Nani has built his reputation on bringing a sense of realism and relatability to even his most commercial performances. The Paradise, however, loses that grounding. The fight sequences routinely defy gravity and, worse, often end up being unintentionally laughable. In a film already overflowing with violence, even dogs and crows are not spared.

Take Jadal’s dog companion, for instance. Having the dog save Jadal is one thing. But making it cry (through questionable AI), take a bullet and then, almost magically, have it back on its feet beside Jadal as though nothing happened is more than a questionable writing choice. It feels like sheer laziness, especially in a film that otherwise attempts to build such a brutal and grounded world.

The Paradise promised a story of a mother and son at its core. And the arc between Jadal and Sonali’s Shamakka keeps the film afloat, when everything else is pulling it from below. But, the arc crops up according to the maker’s convenience, which dulls its impact.

Truth be spoken, Nani goes into beast mode with his performance and does everything he can to hold The Paradise together. But there is only so much an actor can do to salvage such a muddled mess. Another major drawback is the lack of a formidable villain. Malik is introduced as the film’s primary antagonist, yet he gets barely one proper confrontation with Jadal. And even that scene is enough to remind you of a badly made rip-off of Indian 2 — a film that hardly needed another reason to be remembered.

And in a film of this scale, logic does matter. But Odela, who showed promise with Dasara, seems to let logic fly out of the window here. Sonali Kulkarni’s Shamakka is held captive underground by Malik, with seemingly nothing in her vicinity. Yet, the moment Anirudh’s music kicks in, she suddenly has props around her to dance with. A slip-up is understandable, but when a film has several such instances, it begins to feel less like creative liberty and more like sheer carelessness.

Then there are the performances. Mohan Babu has little to work with as Malik, Raghav Juyal’s goofy appearance hardly makes him intimidating, Sonali Kulkarni leans heavily into the mother sentiment, while Kayadu Lohar attempts to bring some freshness to an otherwise relentlessly heavy story. Yet, none of these performances or characters add enough weight to the larger narrative. And that is where The Paradise fails miserably.

The film does have a few interesting ideas. The people from the marginalised tribe walk around with agarbattis in their hands because of the way they smell. The sequence where young Jadal is questioned about his legitimacy, and the way he reacts to it, is also tastefully shot. But in a film that runs for almost three hours, these are only fleeting moments of clarity. When only a handful of such ideas stay with you, it says a lot about how little impact the film ultimately manages to create.

Nani’s performance and Anirudh’s music might offer some respite while watching The Paradise, but they cannot compensate for what feels like a lost opportunity for Srikanth Odela. He clearly wants to say a lot about oppression, identity, revenge and resistance, but in trying to cram too many ideas into one film, he loses sight of the one thing holding them all together — a coherent story.

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