It’s entirely natural to question the existence of the third film — not first, not second — of a crime franchise, regardless of box-office success. Especially if the premise revolves and revolves around a movie-mad father who keeps hiding the body of his daughter’s abuser to protect his family. Especially if the first two are Bollywood remakes of superior Malayalam thrillers. Especially if the third movie, which has “conclusion” in its title, has nothing to do with the third Mohanlal starrer (released in May) and insists on charting its own narrative path. How dare we be original? The signs are ominous, not least because the background score of this Hindi film series has been partially responsible for my hearing problems over the years. How much is too much? Rinse, Roar (that’s Singham, the other Ajay-Devgn-in-Goa franchise), Repeat. Do it once and it’s novel; do it twice and it’s suspect; do it thrice and the cash-cow is mooing.
But lo and behold, Drishyam: The Conclusion is a surprisingly satisfying watch. The first two earned the disadvantage of cultural comparisons with their Malayalam counterparts: louder pitch, simplified setting, more grandstanding, more moment-milking, higher frame-rates. This one, however, is comfortable in its own skin. It is mainstream Hindi storytelling without the baggage of parity, doubling down on its strengths and normalising its weaknesses. There are no promises (and therefore no expectations) of newness after 8 years of one family caught in an endless loop of having to outwit a system rigged against middle-class grit. There is no pressure to adapt or stay ‘faithful’; it is strangely liberated in form and spirit.
The initial framework does the job: ‘unlettered’ men like Vijay Salgaonkar get framed or charged all the time if they come up against a rich and influential family. It doesn’t matter that the murder in the first film was an act of self-defence; it doesn’t matter that the parents of the vile victim are not wrong for seeking closure or revenge; it doesn’t even matter that Vijay’s family has to live with guilt on the wrong side of the law for doing the right thing. The only “villain” in this whole thing is dead; the irony — or maybe it’s an accurate reflection of modern society — is that the good guys fight each other. The subversions of morality and justice are already established. All that’s left is one final stretch of parlour tricks, slow-mo reveals, gotcha grins, and Devgn’s gait being weaponised in the most effective way possible.
Like any severely stretched hit franchise, Drishyam: The Conclusion leans on the crutch of self-awareness. For starters, it writes its repetition and fatigue into the plot; satirising a sin does not absolve the sinner (ask the hundred DDLJ homages today), but in this case, it’s the respectable thing to do. ‘Comic relief’ sub-inspector Gaitonde (Kamlesh Sawant) becomes the medium for these meta references. He cracks jokes about how he’s the only surviving character of the State v/s Salgaonkar case while new bosses (remember Akshaye Khanna?) in sequels come and go. He has punchlines about how October 2nd (also the film’s release date) is a humiliating day for the Goa police force every year because of the incident and allegations that keep getting ‘buried’; he even compares Vijay to his own wife for the familiarity-breeds-contempt kind of disdain he receives. The intro scene of the Crime Branch officer who reopens the file, a metaphor-loving SP Rajveer Singh Tomar (Jaideep Ahlawat), features him talking about a deer who’s so busy escaping from a predator in the jungle that it forgets why it started to run — a nod, perhaps, to a commercial movie franchise that gets so obsessed with the suspense of the chase that everyone forgets why it all began.
The film does another respectable thing, in terms of addressing the inherent flaws of the structure. The parents of the dead boy, former IG Meera Deshmukh (Tabu) and her husband Mahesh (Rajat Kapoor), do not need an excuse to dig up old skeletons; the grief of losing a child and getting no answers can justify any u-turn. There’s the added asterisk of the egos of powerful Indians — this couple, the smug cops, the high-profile lawyers — unable to accept defeat against a seemingly ordinary man. There’s also the fact that every subsequent Drishyam story is designed to excavate the loopholes and exhume the graves of the previous story. For instance, SP Tomar, an outsider, instantly points out how nobody thought of DNA tests of the space under the police station, which in turn leads to an investigation of Vijay’s ‘accomplices’ on that fateful body-swapping night. In context of the film’s heightened world, it’s the logical way to go. It sets the stage for the chain-smoking cop and lawyer (Prakash Raj) to toy with the family and prey on the chinks of their sanitised love — the more arrogant they act, the more rewarding their humble-pie-eating scenes become.
Somehow, watching Vijay always end up a step ahead of his chasers doesn’t get (too) campy. You can see the twists coming from miles away, but you still wait for the dopamine hit of the revelations; the courtroom sequences, in particular, dial up the pulp to potent levels. Every time the walls close in on Vijay, he seems to change shape. The family is attempting to ‘move on’ and inch back to a semblance of normalcy, but it’s hard to tell their togetherness from their tensions. The inter-cutting between the court and a cemetery in the third act is milked until the movie can hear its audience clapping. It’s basically old-school Bollywood writing done right: like the casual introduction of two faces in Vijay’s daily routine (you know they’ll have a role to play in the end), mysterious phone-calls coming full circle, or a track where a character weaponises faith and the spectacle of religion to conceal evidence. There’s a sense that Vijay’s family — whose innocence and complicity he has so fiercely protected — is more attuned to his mind now; they’ve learned to dance in the rain from the cloud that’s perpetually hanging over their heads. His penchant for storytelling (remember, he’s a writer) results in rainy flashbacks, Prestige-coded voiceovers on the lines of “Are you watching closely?,” and unreliable-narrator proverbs. He’s clever and responsible because he’s a cinephile; tell that to your parents the next time they scold you for bunking college.
Of the performances within the performances, Devgn’s trademark blankness works wonders for someone like Vijay: the character is harder to read and more dead-eyed than ever, so even the slightest expression on his face becomes a plot device. Shriya Saran’s strange dialogue delivery as Nandini, too, is put to use in one of the grand twists. Of the rest, Jaideep Ahlawat is as Jaideep Ahlawat as the script needs; in one of the film’s best scenes, he goes into Hans-Landa-in-Inglorious-Basterds mode in the living room during the daughter Anju’s rishta meeting. He makes you forget that the cop almost gets written off the film when the courtroom drama begins (for some reason he’s stuck in a meeting?), or that Kamlesh Sawant’s crowd-pleasing Gaitonde disappears towards the end. Prakash Raj enjoys the posturing; the cocky lawyer he plays gets into a shouting match with the background score, but nobody wins. There’s only so much Tabu can do, again, as the woman who merges the emptiness of a mother with the embarrassment of a former cop; you wish there was more of her, but the first film exhausted that quota in 2015.
There are times when the story teases a darker and more morally ambiguous direction. The “anything” in Vijay’s I-will-do-anything-for-my-family stance expands into an obsession of sorts. He is willing to cross boundaries, so there’s a brief flicker of the desperate father in shows like Tabbar and Breathe. But Drishyam has never been that kind of franchise. Vijay’s threats and actions hint at the emergence of a cold-blooded criminal, but that’s akin to seeing Superman or Batman break their rules and actually kill their enemies. The man’s conscience is never allowed to consume his intellect. His humanity is supposed to fend off the afflictions of an antihero; he has to stay a hero against all odds. His opportunism is selective — like the way he integrates himself into the community, or befriends anyone who might rat on him — because he is wired to distrust the machinations of Indian justice. He knows that the law operates in shades of black and white, so his greyness can’t alienate us from his primary identity as a family man. He also knows that patriarchs like him are destined to be perceived, not believed. It’s why Drishyam: The Conclusion is built on the finality of a lie rather than the return of a truth. Unlike writers who create and readers who escape, it’s the writer who escapes by letting the readers create. The story is entertaining as the showboating cat-and-mouse thriller it chooses to be; the weight of it all can wait.