Family film, suspense thriller and police procedural rarely fit into the same movie and in Bollywood they don’t even share the same shelf. Drishyam brings the genres together in a nail-biting David-and-Goliath game with enough twists in the tale to keep you guessing till that clever last shot.

The Nishikant Kamat-directed Drishyam is a die-hard remake of Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam, which in 2013 became the biggest grossing Malayalam film of all time and has already been remade in Kannada, Telugu (with Venkatesh in the lead) and Tamil (with Kamal Haasan in the lead). Not just plotting and characterisations and scenes and dialogues, it’s so die-hard that the running time of both films clock at exactly 164 minutes!

The story is credited to Joseph but before he sat down to write this hownotdunit, he must have read Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X. Read it carefully. Because not only the basic premise but even little details are completely copy-pasted from the Japanese bestseller. The only major change? He’s turned it into The Devotion of the Family Man.

Vijay Salgaonkar (Ajay Devgn) lives with his wife (Shriya Saran) and two daughters in a fictional Goan village Pondolem. He runs a local cable television company called Mirage (did you see what they did there?) and watches movies all night on the office TV. Only when there’s Sunny Leone strutting her stuff on that small screen, he runs to his wife and jumps into bed.
The elder, adopted daughter goes to some excursion where one of the boys shoots a video of her taking a shower. He comes to the Salgaonkar home hoping to cash in on the video, when the mother-daughter tag team manages to kill the boy and bury the body in the garden. He turns out to be the only son of Inspector General Meera Deshmukh (Tabu), making Vijay’s job to protect his family that much more difficult.

Like in the original Malayalam film, the first half — just an hour, thankfully — is pitiful. An extremely staged display of family love, unnecessary scenes of police corruption and unflattering images of Devgn watching old films on TV make it a real ordeal. The cinema craze is, of course, used to establish how a “chauthi fail gawaar” guy (he was a mathematician in the Japanese book) can mastermind such a cover-up operation.

That masterminding is what makes Drishyam such a compelling watch. How Vijay manages to create fake footprints for the police, how IG Meera is able to see through his plans and how their constant battle of wits reaches a crackling crescendo. Technicalities get a little too complicated at points and downright ridiculous at others but there’s enough heart to stay invested in this game of true lies.

Devgn is well cast as the common man who can go to any length to protect his family. He looks a little tired in the lighter moments but when it comes to the dramatic scenes, he brings in so much honesty and passion that you have to root for the underdog. 

As the film’s villain and yet a distressed mother, Tabu ups the stakes and brings some much-needed energy to the proceedings at the interval point. That police uniform is a little too tight but soon you look past it and marvel at the brilliance of one of our finest.

Of the rest, Rajat Kapoor as Tabu’s husband is perfectly understated as the voice of reason and Kamlesh Sawant so effective as the unscrupulous sub-inspector Gaitonde. Shriya Saran is fine when she is all smiles but a picture of pain when she is scared.

Despite the excessive indoor scenes, Avinash Arun, who directed the award-winning Marathi film Killa, shoots the movie with a lot of panache. The Vishal Bhardwaj songs unfortunately do not belong to this film.

In an intense scene in Drishyam where Ajay Devgn and Tabu come face to face, he desperate to save his daughter and she desperate to find her son, one cannot not think of these two some two decades back going jiggle-wiggle on the streets to Ruk ruk ruk, arre baba ruk... They have come a long, long way and so has Hindi mainstream cinema. With a little help from the south and some more from the world. 

Pratim D. Gupta
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