Krishna and His Leela Review: A Total Cringefest!

Krishna and His Leela starring Siddhu Jonnalagadda, Shraddha Srinath and Shalini Vadnikatti in the lead roles, is the very first Tollywood film to directly an OTT platform, in a rather ordinary fashion on Netflix. Directed by Ravikanth Perepu – the filmmaker behind the 2016 critically-acclaimed thriller Kshanam, the storyline of the movie begins with Satya (Shraddha Srinath) splitting up with her college junior, Krishna (Siddhu) due to some misunderstandings in their relationship.

Consequently, heartbroken over his recent breakup, he comes across Radha (Shalini Vadnikatti) and falls in love with her in the most unordinary circumstances. As the storyline advances, the remainder of the film details how Krishna manages to find his true love with his boyish unsteady mind making sure he makes errors and mistakes along the way.

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Coming off the hot success of Kshanam, Krishna and His Leela worked as a decent alternative for Ravikanth Perepu to display his ability as a writer, this time with a romantic story. He, along with his writing partner, Siddhu, made sure that the film is at least unique and novel when it comes to the storyline. However, excluding the diverse narrative, nothing else worked in this movie’s favor, as it is an absolute cringefest inside and out. And by the end of the two-hour-five-minute runtime, you will quickly realize that you neither got entertained nor watched a compelling rom-com that does not tell a decent story.

The screenplay of Krishna and His Leela is yet another mess for a bunch of different reasons. Primarily, it lacked the seamless transition from one scene to another and failed to create that decisive impact for me to feel, embrace, and at least remember a few scenes by the climax. In addition to that, the film also fell short of compartmentalizing the narrative, or at the bare minimum, following the three-act structure, so that it could have the possibility to flow better. Not having an intermission did not help the latter issue as the film kept moving, with several random scenes toasting the tiny bit of hope that is left.

Advancing to the characters, who, despite having a minimal amount of development, still seemed one-dimensional for the most part. I would have loved to know why the female protagonists kept pursuing this guy despite him having multiple problems through and through and more of their personal and family struggles. And adding more fuel to the fire, a few redundant characters do not add anything essential to the narrative and wasted those significant on-screen minutes that could have come handy to establish the principal characters a bit more. Furthermore, the dialogues labeled as conversations during the opening credits appeared so far off from reality and didn’t feel like something people from Vizag would converse on a day-to-day basis.

On the technical side of things, the entire sound design side of things felt very amateurish and towed more on the lines of a short film rather than a feature. The background score by Sri Charan Pakala felt very ordinary at times, but he succeeded in bringing that contemporary touch to the film through his peppy and melodious songs.

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Performance-wise, Shalini Vadnikatti stands out from the rest through her splendid performance as the female lead, Shraddha Srinath, although her performance is on the decent side of things, she seemed miscast for her role. Siddhu carried the entire film pretty well and flourished in his negative role as a hopeless boyfriend.

Overall, Krishna and His Leela had all the potential to tell a unique story solely based on the premise, but the narrative side of things disappoint to the fullest. And the screenplay was all over the place that it’s hard to sit back and engage and enjoy the content it’s trying to offer. Excluding the decent performances, this movie is an utter mess and will likely get lost in Netflix’s giant movie catalog. Watch ‘Krishna and His Leela’ on Netflix here.

Rating – 1.5/5 | Grade – D+

Images via Suresh Productions