Epic Telugu Movie Review: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Epic is a tender, deeply personal romance that thrives on small, intimate moments, anchored by a standout performance from Vaishnavi Chaitanya, even though its overlong middle stretch tests patience.
Rating: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Language: Telugu
Genre: Romance
Runtime: Around 2 hours 30 minutes
Director: Aditya Hasan
Cast: Anand Deverakonda, Vaishnavi Chaitanya, Sivaji
Telugu cinema has given audiences countless love stories over the years, some remembered for their beginnings, others for their endings. But the rare ones stay with you because of everything in between, the stolen glances, pointless arguments, unexpected laughter, and quiet silences that slowly turn into memories.
Aditya Hasan’s Epic – The First Semester, a direct continuation of the popular 2024 web series 90’s A Middle Class Biopic, is built almost entirely out of these small fragments, and it works best when it leans into exactly that kind of intimacy.
Rather than telling a conventional love story with a clean beginning and end, the film plays out more like a scrapbook, capturing a relationship in all its messy, tender, and occasionally bewildering beauty.
It follows Aditya, played by Anand Deverakonda, a soft spoken, middle class young man from Wanaparthy who travels to London for higher studies while quietly carrying the weight of his family’s expectations. There, he meets Kadali, played by Vaishnavi Chaitanya, and what starts as an unusual connection between the two soon turns into something far messier and more complicated.
The film’s opening stretch, built around Aditya’s airport send-off, is one of its quiet triumphs, capturing the familiar chaos of a small town boy leaving home for the first time while his parents hover nearby with advice they know he will forget. It sets an emotional tone that carries through the rest of the film beautifully.
What really makes Epic stand out is how personal it feels. Small details, like the clapboard marked Epic sitting in Aditya’s room, or the script he is quietly working on, suggest the director has woven real pieces of himself into this story. Familiar touches like Tupperware boxes packed with pickles from home add warmth, while smaller, specific details, like eating dinner in front of an old Venkatesh film, give the world a genuine sense of place rather than feeling generic.
The film shines brightest in its quieter, more intimate moments. In one particularly affecting scene, Kadali simply tells Aditya she has back pain and wants him near her, turning into a gentle, sensitive portrait of a young man learning to understand his partner in ways beyond words.
Sivaji, playing Aditya’s father, delivers some of the film’s most emotionally resonant moments as well, particularly in a quiet scene where he wanders into his son’s empty room after Aditya leaves for the UK, missing him without saying a single word, a gesture beautifully echoed later in the film’s climax.
Vaishnavi Chaitanya is easily the film’s greatest strength, giving Kadali a genuinely unpredictable emotional texture that keeps the relationship feeling alive even when the story itself begins to wander.
Anand Deverakonda, working in a much gentler register than his usual intense on screen persona, is effective in his quieter moments, though his portrayal of shyness occasionally feels a little overplayed rather than natural.
Where the film stumbles is in its pacing. At close to two and a half hours, the middle stretch drags noticeably, particularly during extended conversations between Aditya and Kadali that tend to revisit the same emotional uncertainties without pushing the story meaningfully forward.
A tighter edit could have preserved the film’s leisurely, intimate charm while giving its bigger emotional beats more weight. There is also one tonally jarring outburst involving Kadali that briefly feels like it wandered in from a completely different kind of film.
In the end, Epic – The First Semester never quite becomes the sweeping romance its title suggests, but it does not really need to. Instead, it settles into something smaller and more affecting, a genuine collection of memories, songs, and silences that captures young love exactly as it often is, imperfect, occasionally exhausting, but ultimately worth holding onto.
If you’re planning your theatre lineup this week, you can also check out our reviews of two other new releases: Last Man in Tower, starring Manoj Bajpayee, and Haiwaan, the Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan reunion.