At the time I saw Nishikant Kamat’s Drishyam, I hadn’t seen Jeethu Joseph’s 2013 Malayalam comedy-thriller of the same name, on which it is based. I still haven’t seen the recently released Tamil remake with Kamal Haasan. Nor have I read The Devotion of Suspect X, the Japanese novel that Joseph insists has nothing to do with the movie but which bears, in summary at least, more than a passing resemblance to it. So I was happy to play along with the conceit that this film was “based on an original story” by Joseph instead of being an authorised copy of a possible unauthorised copy.
Drishyam begins in the most un-thriller-like fashion. We meet Vijay, an amiable “chauthi fail ganwaar aadmi” (his own words) who owns a small cable TV business in Pandolim, Goa. The first 40 minutes are spent establishing him as a family man, movie-obsessed, not book smart but a quick thinker, popular in the community—all important factors in what’s to come, but which might nevertheless have been handled with more economy. Just as I was beginning to scribble “Get a move on” on my pad, the film moved straight to fifth gear and stayed there for the next two hours.
The acceleration begins—and skip this paragraph if you’d prefer to avoid a mild spoiler—when Vijay’s elder daughter, Anju, is approached by an unblinking young man who may as well have sleazebag written on his t-shirt. We’d seen the two on a school trip together, and he tells her that he’d shot a video of her taking a bath there. He asks her to meet him at night; she does, bringing along her mom for support (why not her well-muscled dad?). As the boy tries to blackmail the mother—there’s a queasy scene with her going down on her knees to beg for daughter’s honour—Anju grabs a rod and tries to knock the video-containing mobile phone out of his raised hand. She ends up braining him instead, and killing him. Mother and daughter bury the body in the backyard. When Vijay returns the next morning, they tell him all.
Instead of reporting the matter to the police, Vijay comes up with an elaborate plan to cover their tracks. To reveal any further details would be unfair—especially since it’s so rare to see an Indian film that’s constantly (and convincingly) a couple of steps ahead of the audience. Unfortunately, while the twisty plot is enough to see Drishyam home, Kamat’s direction is just serviceable. Too often, he takes multiple scenes to establish things that could have been made clear in one. Remakes are often a good opportunity to trim the fat, but there’s only a minute shaved off the original’s 164-minute running time. There are also tonal inconsistencies: this sort of material is fine when played as a blackly comic thriller, but when the film regresses into a sentimental tale about a man trying to protect his family (and, let’s not forget, covering up a murder), it’s unconvincing. A dash of style might have helped as well. Visuals can be deceptive, the film’s tagline warns—but the visuals here are just drab, even though Kamat has Avinash Arun (Killa, Masaan) behind the camera.
Neither are the performances all that they should be. Ajay Devgn’s been away from serious acting for so long that it’s a relief just to see him underplay and not chomp at the scenery too much. What he can’t do is make Vijay interesting—he struck me as bland even before I saw Mohanlal essay the same role in the original. Shriya Saran as the wife and Ishita Dutta and Mrinal Jadhav as the older and younger daughter respectively do way too much hand-wringing, though whether that’s the director’s instructions or the performers’ fault is difficult to tell.
In the midst of all this is Tabu, operating on a whole different level as IG Meera Deshmukh, a tough-as-nails cop who also happens to be the mother of the dead boy. Meera is immediately suspicious of Vijay—it’s a feeling we cops get, she explains to her husband (a quite moving Rajat Kapoor)—but she’s also fascinated by his manoeuvring and his audacity, even as she’s hurting for her loss. The way Tabu switches between these conflicting emotions, and occasionally allows them to overlap, is a sight to behold. Despite being saddled with a number of scenes in which she’s asked to glare at the camera in slo-mo, she’s the best thing in the film by some distance. Drishyam is a solid remake, but a film with Tabu as in the Vijay role and Devgn as the cop would have been so much more exciting.
Drishyam releases in theatres on Friday
