Agent Sai Srinivasa Athreya 2019

Sai Srinivas Athreya, Naveen Polishetty, is an energetic yet weary amateur detective in Nellore who styles himself Agent Sai Srinivas Athreya and runs a small, self-styled agency named the FBI (Fatima Bureau of Investigation). He pieces together clues in petty cases with the help of his loyal assistant, Sneha, and he does so with a dry wit and a stubborn dedication. Behind his routine victories lies a deeper wound: years of grieving the sudden death of his mother, a trauma that shapes how he reads danger, motive, and truth. The world he inhabits is intimate, crowded with local faces, familiar streets, and the stubborn realities of crime that feel close to home.

One day, an ordinary day of chasing minor mischief turns strange when his friend Sirish, Prashant Yarramilli, alerts him to an unidentified body found in Venkatachalam. Athreya travels there with his trademark mix of curiosity and bravado, only to be met by the stern, imposing CI Gautham Krishna, Viswanath Mandalika, who arrests him on charges of murder. The arrest is abrupt, almost theatrical, and it plunges Athreya into a moment of quiet peril that tests both his faith in his own innocence and his trust in the police who are supposed to protect it. The confrontation reveals a larger issue at play—a pattern of manipulation, power, and cover-up that calls into question who really holds the authority to decide who is guilty.

In the dim, claustrophobic space of the prison that night, Athreya meets a man named Maruthi Rao, who claims that his daughter Divya, Divya Vineeth Divya, vanished after a trip to Ongole and was later found dead, the victim of brutal violence. Maruthi Rao insists that the police framed him for the crime, painting a picture of a corrupted system that crushes the innocent. He also provides Athreya with three phone numbers that Divya was in contact with just before her death. Intrigued and unsettled, Athreya and Sneha begin to dig into those numbers, hoping to uncover a thread that might untangle the truth behind the body in Venkatachalam. The trail leads them to three young people—Ajay, Sandeep Raj; Harsha, Vinu Varma; and Vasudha, Shredha Rajagopalan—who were in Ongole on the fateful day Divya disappeared. Vasudha, however, cannot be traced, and a sense of foreboding settles over the investigation.

Athreya’s suspicions are momentarily interrupted by a glimpse of a woman on a highway who resembles Divya. The moment is fleeting and enigmatic—the look-alike has a different father and does not respond to his attempts to speak—an echo of the cases that feel just out of reach, taunting the detective with the possibility of a larger scheme at work. Back in Nellore, Athreya tracks Maruthi Rao to a sub-jail and discovers the startling truth: Maruthi Rao is the man he’s been chasing, but his real name is Gopalam, Krishneswara Rao, a figure connected to the network behind the unidentified body and the deaths that begin to mount.

The case hardens quickly as Ajay and Harsha are brutally murdered, and the weight of suspicion swings toward Athreya himself. He finds himself framed, and his world narrows to a brutal countdown: after being released on bail thanks to CCTV footage showing he was in the Nellore sub-jail when the murders occurred, he discovers he has only five days to prove his innocence. The stakes rise as it becomes clear that Ajay and Harsha were trying to uncover Athreya’s movements when they were killed, and Vasudha—the missing link—may hold the key to a larger conspiracy. The police appear determined to cancel his bail, a cruel reminder that the system may be configured to eliminate outsiders who threaten a powerful, hidden machine.

The investigation takes an unexpected turn when Athreya encounters a lanky, persistent figure nicknamed “Bobby,” who has been tailing him. Bobby, it turns out, is also an amateur detective—an orange-tinted mirror image from Hassan, Karnataka—who believes Athreya is the real murderer, a misdirection designed to derail both of them. With this new ally and the relentless support of Sneha and Sub Inspector Vamsi, Ram Dutt—who becomes more involved as the case deepens—Athreya begins to see a vast conspiracy unfolding across regional lines. The bodies piling up along a railway track between Kakinada and Tada, left to rot if unclaimed after 72 hours, appear to be moving in a calculated pattern: these corpses are loaded onto a Chennai-to-Delhi goods train, a grisly system designed to disappear people and their identities.

Athreya and his small cadre—Bobby, Sneha, and Vamsi—execute a bold plan to chase the truth. They fake his death to draw the network out of hiding and travel to Arambakkam, Tamil Nadu, where the trail narrows to the people who profit from a cruel scheme that manipulates death itself. In Arambakkam, Gopalam confesses to the whole scheme: an organization hires men like him to collect dead bodies from Hindu families, promising to cremate them in Kasi in exchange for money. Instead, the bodies are dumped on the railway tracks, their fingerprints co-opted to enable further crimes—rig elections, frame rivals, and obscure the real culprits behind an even bigger plan. The conspiracy seems designed to keep the truth from surfacing and to ensure that talismans from Bethaballi Amman NGO—a symbol of sanctity and protection—are not found among the corpse tags.

As the pieces fall into place, Sneha and Vamsi uncover that Ajay, Harsha, and Vasudha were students who worked on a college project about religious crimes in India, and their research photos reveal a startling discovery: Vasudha is alive and is the mastermind behind the operation. The plan was not merely to evict crime from their path but to manipulate it, to stage their own investigation as a trap for Athreya, and to frame Bobby for crimes he did not commit. Vasudha’s knowledge and audacity drive the plot to a climactic confrontation as the team races to Bethaballi Amman NGO’s offices, only to find them deserted. The trail leads to Rajasthan, to a hideout near the Karni Mata Temple, where the investigators corner Vasudha and her father and hand them over to the Nellore police.

In a quiet, poignant farewell, Athreya bids goodbye to Bobby and, with Sneha, pays respects at the crematorium for Mahalakshmi, a reminder that the dead carry the weight of truth into the living world. The case closes with Athreya returning to his life of petty investigations, a reminder that justice is a process, not a single judgment. Yet the final image—Athreya continuing to headbutt local cases with his characteristic tenacity—suggests that the pursuit of the truth will continue, and the door to a possible sequel remains open. The world he inhabits is a dense tapestry of crime and conscience, where the line between hero and target is blurred, and where one investigator’s resolve can spark a larger reckoning.