Drishyam 2

Scene 01One Story, Five Languages

What drove this frenzy of remakes? A superbly tight-knit story by Jeethu Joseph. At its core, Drishyam is a well-crafted thriller, ripe with surprise and suspense, a cat-and-mouse game played to perfection. It is the kind of script that producers in other languages watch once and immediately reach for the phone.

The story belongs to a family man, Georgekutty. He began life as an orphan, barely schooled, and through plain hard work has built a small cable TV business in a rural town. All Georgekutty has is his family: his wife Rani and two daughters. And in the most filmy way possible, he is ready to go to any length to protect them. He also watches an absurd number of films, which matters more than it first appears.

One stormy night, a boy tries to blackmail Georgekutty’s elder daughter, Anju, with a clip from a hidden camera. Rani confronts him, there is an altercation, and Anju hits the boy with a rod. The injury is internal and almost instantly fatal. Terrified and not knowing what else to do, mother and daughter bury the boy in their compound.

Georgekutty returns the next morning and learns two things: what happened, and who the boy was. He is the son of Inspector General Geetha Prabhakar. Georgekutty understands at once that the odds are stacked against him, and the underdog sets about carving out a plan. What follows is a battle of wits between the simpleton Georgekutty and the formidable Geetha, between a man armed with nothing but cinema and a woman armed with the entire police force.

The ending is not a surprise. Georgekutty, the filmy hero, wins. The surprise is how he wins: the film keeps showing you exactly what it wants you to see, which is, after all, what the title means. Drishyam: the visual, the scene, the thing seen.

Scene 02What the Remakes Kept

What is interesting is what happened to the story as it travelled. The adaptations are minimal. Names are made local: Georgekutty becomes Suyambulingam in Tamil and Vijay Salgaonkar in Hindi. A few religious and cultural references shift, so a scene with a calf in Kerala becomes a dog in Goa. Very minor changes.

The landscape is deliberately kept the same: a scenic small town with hills, rain and a police station under construction, and even a similar kind of house for the family. The story is woven so tightly that these elements are load-bearing walls. Remove one and the plot falls on your head. So, thankfully, they stay.

One superficial difference is production value: budgets, polish and the casting of supporting roles. Once a major star is signed for the lead, the remaining budget shows in the rest of the cast, roughly in proportion to the prosperity of each industry. If the Hindi Drishyam sits at the top of that scale, the Kannada Drishya sits at the other end. The Malayalam original, naturally, is kept out of any such scale. You do not grade the original against its photocopies.

Scene 03Five Georgekuttys

Beyond the economics, the five films offer an insight into the sensibilities of five film industries. Nowhere is this clearer than in the central character. Several supporting actors reprised their roles across languages (Asha Sharath played the IG in the Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil versions, while Tabu took the part in Hindi), but Georgekutty was played by a different star every time. The same man, five times over. And each time he carries a different conscience.

Scene 04A Sequel the Way Sequels Should Be

Now to the sequel, Drishyam 2, which arrived in 2021, in Malayalam, straight to streaming. Just as this essay took its sweet time getting to the point, Drishyam 2 has a long, slow first half. And hopefully, like the film, this essay also manages to bring all its threads together at the end.

Drishyam 2 is a sequel the way sequels should be. Not one of those sequels where a kidnapping in part one means a bigger kidnapping in part two, with a helicopter. It picks up the thread six years after the first film. There is no new murder. The film still revolves around the original death and the original secret. It has the same cat-and-mouse game, the same battle of wits and the same unexpected turns, but it is about what the first film left behind.

Scene 05The Writer’s Conscience

Drishyam 2 confronts the essential dilemma of the first film. From a moral standpoint, a crime went unpunished. And not a crime like a heist, where you loot an unscrupulous tycoon or a predatory bank and can wave the Robin Hood flag. In Drishyam, a death was hidden and a family got away with it. The audience cheered. We wanted Georgekutty to win, and he did.

That moral void troubles someone: the creator of this universe, the writer.

So in Drishyam 2, Jeethu Joseph deals with the fact that “Georgekutty got away,” and cleverly changes the question.

Scene 06The Chess Player Who Can Never Stand Up

Georgekutty’s life six years later is that of a chess player who must constantly think ten or twelve moves ahead. The crucial difference: this game never ends. In chess, someone eventually says checkmate and everyone goes home. Georgekutty’s opponents keep changing and refreshing themselves, a new IG, a new team, new methods, but Georgekutty must stay on his toes forever. He cannot win; he can only avoid losing, every day, for the rest of his life.

Scene 07From Underdog to Rich Man

The film is also a social commentary, and a sharp one. In the first film the tight-knit rural community is entirely on Georgekutty’s side. He is “poor Georgekutty,” the cable-TV man being hounded by a powerful police officer, and the villagers rally behind the underdog.

In Drishyam 2, Georgekutty has prospered. The small-time cable operator now owns a cinema hall and dreams of producing a film. And the same people who protected him now detest the new, “rich” Georgekutty. They gossip behind his back. They believe in his guilt. They are itching to see him fall.

Scene 08Two Family Men

Drishyam 2 is also a bit meta. Throughout the film there are discussions about writing a screenplay for an upcoming film: a man in the story is trying to write the story, while the man who wrote the story watches him. And there is an interesting parallel built into the plot.

Georgekutty, a family man who has hidden a crime, comes close to being caught because of another family man, a police informant. This informant is himself a killer, and his decision to inform on Georgekutty is driven by “family” reasons.

Scene 09Luck, and the Hero Who Is Lucky

On its own, Drishyam 2 can feel slow, and it has a few logical leaps compared to the near-perfect first film. But it should be seen in the larger context, as a second chapter of the same story rather than a standalone thriller.

It begins like Georgekutty’s slow march towards a confession. Then it reveals itself as a thriller and turns Georgekutty into a meticulous planner, a man who has spent six years preparing for a day that might never come. And in the end, the film winks at its own audience: it takes a great deal of luck, and so what if the hero is lucky? It is just a film.

That line is the writer talking to himself. Yes, Georgekutty walks out again. Yes, it requires luck. But the writer has made sure we understand what walking free costs: no rest, no trust, no peace. The conscience has not been cleared; it has been paid in instalments.

A patient must-watch!

Scene 10The Illusion Travels

On a side note, Drishyam has broken more than Indian language barriers. It was remade in Sinhala as Dharmayuddhaya, and it reached Chinese shores as Sheep Without a Shepherd, where it became a big box-office hit. The sequel, too, has been remade, in Telugu and Kannada and later in Hindi with Ajay Devgn returning as Vijay Salgaonkar, and a third chapter has been announced. Georgekutty, it seems, will be serving his sentence for a while.