Gautham Mahesh Babu is a schizophrenic rock musician who is missing 25% of his grey matter. He experiences vivid hallucinations and fixates on a mysterious figure he believes is one of the three murderers of his parents. As a child, Gautham clung to the belief that he was an orphan, unable to recall his parents’ names or faces. At a packed concert, he spots one of the men and gives chase, while Sameera, Kriti Sanon a journalist in attendance, films Gautham fighting his imagined opponent. After he claims he has killed three men—one in Belfast, one in Pune, and one just now in Hyderabad—he surrenders to the police, and Sameera’s televised video leads to his release.
A psychiatrist explains that if Gautham can conjure a fourth, real person beyond the three, his treatment could proceed. He heads to Goa for a vacation, hoping for quiet, but Sameera follows, insinuating that two stalkers are after him: a real fan and an imaginary journalist. Gautham begins to fall for Sameera, and he even saves her from a murderous mob; on a secluded island, he starts to doubt the existence of the fourth figure and writes Sameera off as a troubled journalist. By the time he grasps her true motives, she has already left for Hyderabad, and he pursues her, inadvertently fanning the flames of suspicion.
Back in Hyderabad, a mysterious figure tries to kill Sameera, and Gautham intervenes. He learns that the enigmatic stalker is Antonio Rosarius, a Goa-based crime boss connected to the deaths of his parents and determined to silence Sameera for threatening his seed-smuggling and toxins scheme. Gautham encounters Rosarius in the lobby of Sameera’s office building and, convinced he is hallucinating, shoots Rosarius dead. Only later does he realize Rosarius is truly dead and that his parents were murdered by Rosarius, aided by an untold network. He then captures an aged taxi driver who had been stalking him—the third of the supposed killers—and discovers that Rosarius, along with an NRI in London, killed his parents; his father had entrusted a bag to the taxi driver for Gautham.
In the bag lie a Rubik’s Cube, a key, and a British coin. Gautham, Sameera, and Gulab Singh Posani Krishna Murali—the driver who helps them—travel to London. They narrowly escape another murder attempt, and Rosarius’s schemes unravel as the cube points to a safe deposit box containing a preserved rice sample. After another near-fatal confrontation in a parking lot, the trio, with Singh’s aid, evades the police and Rosarius’s conspirators. One of the pursuers—a fan—seeks vengeance for his father, one of the other murderers blamed on Gautham, in Belfast. Gautham discovers that the aged taxi driver he had previously encountered is in fact the businessman behind the killings, and that the innocent taxi driver was the one accidentally struck by the businessman’s car.
The businessman reveals that he and Gautham’s father were once successful partners who collaborated on cultivating Golden rice, a crop designed to thrive in any climate. When Gautham’s father refused to commercialize it for profit, the businessman and Rosarius murdered his parents. When the truth is laid bare, Gautham refuses to reveal more and ends the confrontation by killing the businessman. On the way to the airport, memory returns as he passes his childhood school and hears children singing a rhyme he once learned with his mother. He returns to his dilapidated villa, finds a photo of Chandrasekhar and Kalyani, and—armed with the revelation of his parents’ fate—introduces the Golden rice variety at a global convention as “the second green revolution.” The film closes with Gautham standing in a field of golden rice, a more complete man who has confronted his past and his power.
