The man at the centre of Dacoit has a very specific kind of wound. Not the sort that comes from a bullet or a blade, but the quieter, more corrosive sort that comes from trusting the wrong person entirely. Haridas, played by Adivi Sesh, is introduced as a man in love. By the time the title card settles, he is a man in prison, convicted of a crime he did not commit, and the person responsible for the betrayal is the woman he built his life around. It is a setup that Telugu audiences know well, but director Shaneil Deo approaches it with a tone that feels deliberately off-centre, blending the grammar of a revenge thriller with the emotional register of a romance gone wrong.
Mrunal Thakur plays Saraswati, the woman at the heart of that betrayal, though the film complicates her considerably by giving her a second identity, Juliet. That duality is not a gimmick. It shapes the film's structure, allowing Deo to move between the domestic warmth of a marriage and the colder, transactional world of robberies that eventually pull both characters into the same orbit. The narrative does not simply track Haridas from prison cell to pursuit; it threads his hunt through a series of heists, so that vengeance and crime become intertwined rather than separate tracks. The result is a film that uses the revenge template as a spine but keeps finding ways to wander off it.
What has drawn attention since the film's release on April 10 is the ensemble around the central pair. Anurag Kashyap appears as D Rambabu, a role that leans into the filmmaker's established screen presence, while Prakash Raj brings his usual gravity to Solomon. Sunil Varma, better known for comedy, is cast as Prasad, and the film reportedly gives him room to work against type. Atul Kulkarni's Ishaq Bhai and Zayn Marie Khan's SI Janaki round out a cast that is unusually deep for a film built around a two-hander. Kamakshi Bhaskarla appears as Malli, a character who, by the accounts of those who have seen the film, carries more weight than her screen time might suggest.
At 150 minutes, Dacoit is not in a hurry. Deo, working with a script that keeps folding new characters into Haridas's path, allows scenes to breathe, particularly in the first hour where the romance between Haridas and Saraswati is established with enough care that its later collapse lands with real force. That patience is a risk in a genre that often rewards velocity, but it also gives the film an emotional texture that distinguishes it from the usual revenge fare. The robberies, when they arrive, are staged with a matter-of-factness that suits the film's tone, less about spectacle than about the way crime becomes ordinary for people who have already lost everything.
The film's TMDb rating of 6.9 suggests a divided response, which is unsurprising for a project that tries to hold action, romance and thriller elements in the same frame and refuses to let any one of them dominate. Adivi Sesh, coming off a run of films that have positioned him as a star willing to take on darker material, plays Haridas with a controlled stillness that suits a man who has spent years thinking about a single person. Thakur's Saraswati is harder to pin down, and that ambiguity is clearly the point, a performance that keeps the audience guessing about how much of the woman Haridas loved was ever real.
Shaneil Deo, making his feature debut with this film, shows a willingness to let the camera linger on faces rather than cutting away to movement. It is a choice that puts pressure on the cast, and they mostly respond. The film's Telugu release positions it within a busy year for the industry, and its willingness to blend commercial revenge beats with a more measured, character-driven approach marks it as something of an outlier. Whether that combination holds together for every viewer is a question the film leaves open, but the ambition is visible in every frame. Dacoit is not a film that shouts its intentions. It prefers to let the betrayal sit, and then to follow the man who has to live with it.
