Perhaps the boldest move in Drishyam: The Conclusion comes from director and co-producer Abhishek Pathak, who has announced that he plans to end this immensely successful film series.
By part two, released four years ago, the cable operator had become the owner of a successful movie theatre. Audiences love Vijay Salgaonkar (Ajay Devgn). Applause kept erupting, in fact, in the theatre where I recently watched him outwit the police yet again, in the third film. Still, quite a lot has changed. Now, along with the dead body, all his wrinkles have disappeared, leaving his face as smooth as an uncooked chapati. Still, he is a working-class hero. An underdog who survives by his wits rather than his muscle. He doggedly continues to take on the establishment. This makes him refreshingly different from Bollywood heroes of recent years. This time, Rajveer Singh Tomar (Jaideep Ahlawat) of the Crime Branch reopens the case in which Vijay is a suspect. Star prosecutor Indrajith Shetty (Prakash Raj) joins Tomar and former policewoman Meera (Tabu) in their hunt for the man.
Vijay has had something of a glow-up since we first met him in 2015. Pathak wrote the story of …The Conclusion While Drishyam (2015; directed by Nishikant Kamat) and Drishyam 2 (2022; directed by Pathak) were faithful remakes of the Malayalam originals (released in 2013 and 2021). Because devgn’s one expression is deadpan, none of this perturbs our hero, largely.
It doesn’t help that Tomar’s idea of intimidation involves palming Vijay’s right pectoral and murmuring “Dhak-dhak, dhak-dhak.”
Central to Drishyam 2 was an admission that Vijay’s wife Nandini (Shriya Saran) made to an undercover cop, which established that her husband had hidden Meera’s son’s corpse. Ahlawat is a wonderful actor and is occasionally menacing as Tomar, but Vijay never seems in any danger of being exposed. To Pathak’s credit, this works to his film’s advantage. The fun of Drishyam: The Conclusion is not in any pretension of suspense, but in the guarantee that the hero will make the brutish police look foolish. A key revelation, however, does undercut the second film. They even carried out an elaborate charade in which the youngest daughter walked around playing a recording of Vijay’s voice, to fool the police into thinking he was home on the night he disposed of key evidence. Why, then, would Nandini share such confidences with a neighbour? Then again, …The Conclusion would have us believe a fake skeleton built by a props fabricator was so realistic that it fooled a gaggle of policemen, including the brilliant Tomar. Evidently, making perfect sense is not among the film’s priorities. The pulpy tone of Drishyam: The Conclusion, meanwhile, is a far cry from how the series began. Kamat’s Drishyam had the distinction of being a remake more elegant than the original. Avinash Arun’s cinematography, Aarif Sheikh’s editing and the music by Vishal Bhardwaj elevated writer-director Jeethu Joseph’s clever story. Knowing the ending did nothing to dull the menace of that first film. The horror of sexual harassment came through viscerally (only to fade in the subsequent two parts). There was an immense satisfaction to watching a cruel police force reduced to helplessness by a community of everyday folk. In this popular trilogy, Drishyam came first in more ways than one. (Write to Deepanjana Pal @dpanjana on Instagram. The views expressed are personal)
In …The Conclusion, we are told the family knew they were under surveillance.
