Drishyam movie analysis

Drishyam

Cast: Mohanlal, Meena

Written and Directed by Jeethu Joseph

Movie analysis by Zulfi (4/5)

            The secret to success of ‘whodunits are never whodunits but how-done-its’. Drishyam is an out and out how-done-it and it is a spellbinding one. Rarely has an Indian movie come with such a compact script, which does all the work and takes a little help of excellent performances from the leads. This Malayalam movie directed and written by Jeethu Joseph was made in four other languages and each met with success. The formula for all these movies having worked albeit with mediocre performances from the regional stars was a single dictum followed by the regional makers. The dictum was following the original script as a blueprint for all the translations. There is no other way it could have been written and so crisply explained as is done by Jeethu Joseph.

            The story primarily has Georgekutty, (Mohanlal) who is a cable operator, a simple and happy man with a respectable name among the people of his little village. Though he discontinued his studies after the fourth grade, he has this worldly knowledge thanks to his extensive watching of any movie owing to his professional background. His wife, Rani (Meena) and his two daughters comprise one very happy family. When his elder daughter attends nature camp and becomes the victim of a secret recorded footage of her bathing by a pervert teenager, who turns out to be the spoilt son of a local IG of police, Geetha Prabhakar (Asha Sarath), they don’t know that their lives will change forever. In a cascade of unforeseen circumstances the whole family gets involved as prime suspects in a capital offence, from which their escape is a near unachievable thing. And the man who maybe the prime witness to his suspicious activities is his nemesis, Sahadevan, a local constable. The local IG is the mother of the missed boy or the victim and she is one tough nut to crack. But Georgekutty uses his cinematic ingenuity to get his family out of this death mire.

            The flavour to the movie is mainly aided by the local colour. Kerala looks so fresh and vintage green with its endearing locales and native people, who live and survive as though they are doing it in front of an invisible camera. There is this professional approach to every character on the screen, who is busy in his own work. The hotel owner looks the hotel owner and the contract builder looks him. Mohanlal doesn’t in any shot tries to work under his clout. He fears for his family like a common villager and doesn’t become emotional when police torture his family. That’s because fear becomes before aggression. Though, this is just the backdrop of the story, it gives a convincing background for the rest of the tale to collage well into the overall picture.

            Coming to the how-done-it part, I have been a big fan of Agatha Christie and her work has been more about the explaining of the riddle as much as the perpetrator of the crime. Though she misleads the reader with her hovering finger, the way she tells her tale and uncovers layers of red herrings to show us the underlying portrait of crime is more rewarding. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes had been more about observation and character study than the crime per se. And generally stories with a great detail of hidden crime, work. ‘drishyam’ concerns itself with a simple situation but the way the events proceed is something of great importance. Another huge advantage of ‘drishyam’ is that there are no red herrings. You know the crime and the doers, but what you don’t know is the fact, that while you think you know everything, you know nothing. The main conventional point of ‘drishyam’ is in the primeval dealing of evidence of the alibis. Alibis can be either innocent or created. When criminals tamper with alibis and create a new one, purposefully, it becomes a long winding work or them covering the tracks, which were the result of covering their tracks. Christie was an expert in this issue of alibis and the credibility of their evidence. You could see her ingenuous work over these innocent culprits in ‘Evil under the sun’ and ‘Lord Edgware dies’. Georgekutty creates alibis and he does that without making the alibis aware of it. A sign of a great criminal mastermind. The mentioning of the work done on the alibis will be the undoing of the mystery of the tale, but it will suffice to know that the vision of alibis is what the title is named after.

            The main spice of the story is the war of the brains between the IG mother and Georgekutty. While she takes him for granted at the beginning for being an early school dropout, the way the latter builds an ironclad alibi makes her look beyond his 4^th standard academic achievement. His case build up will later showcase how much ironclad is it in terms of evidence.  The movie doesn’t explore the depths of physical details of the crime but mainly on the evidence based one. Even in this modern updated technology, we still see our advanced scientific tools getting limped by the evidence based decisions made by the police. How far we have gone in crime detection doesn’t depend on our tools but on how we use them. georgekutty creates a loophole in this little nugget of knowledge. Like in IG’s words, he stops at 4^th standard but studies the life as a whole.

            Mohanlal as a veteran actor respects the role he does and acts with a fine balance of being a father and a criminal mastermind. Meena as his wife is plumb as the traditional, innocent housewife and believes her man in the time of the need. Both the daughters complete the so natural looking family and the chemistry between any of them is highly rewarding to the movie. Asha Sarath triumphs as the unbelieving and relentless IG doesn’t getting impeded by her husband’s diffident approach towards the family, which might have harmed their son.

 In the final scene, Georgekutty hints at the fact that their son wouldn’t make it back home and they start getting adapted to the fact that they would have it live their rest of the life heirless. This is done in a reference mode rather than in the conventional fashion. This scene reflects the apology from the man as well as his oblique reference of admission of his crime because he buries the secret deep in his heart. The final shot of the movie is touché as he even takes the law, unsuspectingly, as his aide to cover up the crime. Many times while watching a movie, we route for criminals to not even leave a single shred of evidence, making it the perfect crime, which according to ‘dial M for Murder’ is near impossible. But ‘drishyam’ just goes nearest to prove the opposite.