Aditya is packed off to a UK campus he never wanted, shipped out by family expectation, and meets Kadali before his first day ends. Aditya Haasan keeps his camera on that small collision, shared kitchens, campus walks, parents calling from Wanaparthy, and asks it to carry an entire film of longing.
Anand Deverakonda Plays the Softness, Not the Spine
Anand Deverakonda’s Aditya agrees first and resents later, and the actor plays that delay beautifully, the pause before a yes, the swallow before a no. Scenes with his parents land hardest, because his stillness reads as years of quiet accommodation rather than shyness. Opposite Kadali, though, he is asked for very little resistance, and offers less still.
Aditya Haasan’s Feelings-First Approach Costs Him an Hour
Haasan’s strength is refusing to organise a relationship into tidy beats; he films what being together feels like, not what it settles. The cost is a middle hour circling the same doubts about career, family and future, long after we have understood them. His eccentric flourishes read as pretension, and I found the slack pacing harder to forgive than the odd staging.
The Flatmate Kitchen Is Where This Romance Actually Lives
Aditya and Kadali move from strangers to flatmates to something neither will name, and the film is smartest in that unlabelled middle. A shared meal, a borrowed charger, an argument nobody escalates into a scene, these are the beats Haasan gets right. India Today observed that the film “turns ordinary moments into memories of young love.”
The real turning point is not a betrayal or a grand gesture but a question: can this survive two careers pulling in different directions? The film treats that doubt with patience, and patience is not the same as insight. It circles the same worry for a full hour longer than it earns.
The London apartment sequences carry genuine warmth, especially the quiet scenes where Aditya’s parents intrude by phone and the room goes silent. The UK student-life backdrop does much of the lifting; THR India called it “perhaps its only distinguishing feature.” That line is compliment and indictment in one breath.
Vasuki and Sivaji Quietly Outact the Central Couple
Vaishnavi Chaitanya gives Kadali a practical streak that keeps the romance from floating off into montage, and her ambition scenes never feel decorative. Sivaji and Vasuki, as Aditya’s parents, turn two brief phone calls into the film’s most affecting passages. Their casting signals the intent clearly: this is a family-pressure story wearing a romance’s clothes.
Familiar as the terrain is, there is an entire tradition of Telugu Drama reviews tracing exactly this distance between family expectation and first love, and this one adds little to that shelf but plenty of warmth.
A 4.8 on IMDb Is the Only Verdict That Sticks
Nothing here courted controversy, so the argument stays entirely about the work. On IMDb it sits at 4.8 from roughly a thousand votes, and the complaints cluster around freshness. Viewers praised the tenderness and Hesham Abdul Wahab’s melodious songs; they tired of familiar questions asked without new answers.
If you want romance built from texture rather than incident, a weekday show is defensible. Come expecting a mood piece and the limp middle bothers you less; come expecting a story and it bothers you considerably more. A regular screen suits it, though nothing here would suffer on a streaming night.
Where this film studies a son slowly bending under family expectation, Mirzapur review turn that same pressure into something far more lethal, and the contrast sharpens both.
Epic – First Semester earns a modest 2.5 out of 5, worth a patient streaming night, not a full-price ticket.
Both follow romances that never quite locate their pulse, though Aali verdict carries a keener sense of drift.
