How rare is it for simply the payoff being worth paying so much attention to? Jeethu Joseph’s tough sequel is a great example
A still from Drishyam 2. Pic/Amazon Prime Video
The crime/death/murder in Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam (2013) takes place on August 2, 2013, with its cover-up spread over two days. Which in the context of Joseph’s Drishyam 2 happened six years ago.
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In the manner of real sequels that take forward plot, event, characters (possibly the toughest screenwriting skill for a feature film), the police are still investigating what happened with that killing and subsequent burial. Because the dead body is missing since.
What do cops do — operating from government offices with portraits of Indira Gandhi and APJ Abdul Kalam on their walls, in 2019? Collate names of news and milk vendors from the area to accurately recall Aug 3 morning, 2013! They track down people who went to a club party that same night.
God knows what you remember, from what you casually observed over half a decade ago, let alone down to exact date/time — the police actually fish out a guy who was up that precise hour, because his kid had asthma. While calling up the doc, he remembers a jeep driving past his window.
Who was in it? Protagonist Georgekutty (single name, like ‘Amitavachan’ as Bhikhu Mhatre calls Big B in Satya)! Does this discovery sound externally logical? That’s unimportant.
Take a more recent example — the film Dil Bechara (2020), starring late Sushant Singh Rajput, whose character, suffering from osteosarcoma cancer, without leg, walks on artificial support. What’s your best memory of the movie? Rajput dancing like a dream, gliding over cinema seats, moving like Prabhu Deva.
Did anyone think there was something odd there? It’s the movies. So long as it seems internally consistent to a viscerally inclined audience, you can get away with anything! We were more pained and struck by a recently deceased Rajput in a story about death — blurring lines between fiction and reality — to care for anything else.
Dil Bechara was a mainstream tragic-romantic drama. Drishyam 2 is more suspense than mystery than thriller. How do you tell between these three genres though? Difficult question. I’ll go with how much the audience knows about a story before it plays out.
If they keep discovering newer facts, with the noose around culprit/s getting tighter with time, it’s a mystery. If facts are known, only events unravel from thereon, it’s suspense.
For academic purposes, like drawing categories for awards, a thriller (in my head) is more plot-driven, in an edge-of-seat sort of way, inevitably involving gun/s. Everything, regardless of genre, is drama, anyway. Whether it’s uniformly light or dark is the more vertical question of voltage/tone.
You know all along that the leading [family] man in Drishyam 2 got rid of the corpse of an extortionist young boy, who sought to defame his daughter, with a video clip, in a revenge porn kinda scenario.
The simpleton Georgekutty, who seems to have done well for himself in the intervening years of the sequel, inviting neighbours’ envy, is of course played by Mohanlal Sir. That ‘sir’ just wrote itself! Being around Mallu fans of Mohanlal’s movies, the respect rubs off — particularly because it’s a more evolved base than Rajini Sir’s in Tamil Nadu.
Same Mallu friends will also tell you that the Bollywood remake of Drishyam (2015; starring Ajay Devgn) is not a patch on the Malayalam original. Except, few, if anyone in North India, got to see it. Last checked, it’s still not available on a major OTT platform. You’ve gotta credit the recent explosion of global web-streaming services that Indians are getting to enjoy Indian films/premieres (particularly from Kerala topping charts).
To a point that the buzz around Malayalam Drishyam 2 [on Amazon Prime Video; sharply subtitled in English], among a set, rivals anything that Hindi cinema has produced lately — flattening the curve of supposedly regional cinema/stardom.
By which I also mean texture, characters and moments so rooted that it doesn’t surprise me the number of Mallu/other fanatics who exist, owning a cinema as wholly their home’s.
Drishyam was apparently inspired by Japanese Keigo Higashino’s crime novel, The Devotion of Suspect X. A charge that writer-director Joseph has vehemently denied, including in court.
The second part could well have germinated from real-life Sheena Bora murder case — of cops’ search for a missing body — since that came to the fore in 2015, when Joseph had started work on a seemingly impossible script.
Of course, there are no serious similarities between that gory mystery, and this relaxed suspense, that breaks into a song in its 55th minute — adding to the chai-cookies kinda Sunday evening, family-viewing feel to it, that’d be hard to imagine in regular crime fiction.
I savoured 153 minutes of Drishyam 2 in portions, like you would a series. It’s a slow watch, rather than simply a slow burn — if you’ll excuse that cliché sometimes attached to tests of patience. What did I learn from it?
That old, golden rule of showbiz: First 15 minutes [of a script] is how you bag a movie; impressing the moneybag, of course. Sequels with captive audience don’t even need that. But it’s in the final 15 minutes that you really bag the audience, forever. Drishyam 2 has the rare pay-off that makes paying so much attention worthwhile. Can see the third; wouldn’t care if we’re still talking 2013!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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