Movie Review : Drishyam (2015)

Rating : 3.7/5
Genre : Drama
Year : 2015
Running time : 2 hours 43 minutes
Director : Nishikant Kamat
Cast : Ajay Devgan, Shriya Saran, Tabu, Rajat Kapoor
Kidwise Rating: PG-13

Drishyam is a remake of a Malayalam film, and even though in Hindi, feels drenched in Southie-Movie culture. The location is a small Goan village. The protagonist Vijay Salgaonkar (Devgn), a 4th class fail, self-made man is a cable TV operator, who may or may not reach home in the evening depending on whether he gets too engrossed in watching movies in the office. His wife (Saran) thinks it all par for the course, and appears perky and bright and smiling, dressed in saris, forever cooking in the kitchen. She depends on him to be the bread-winner, the one to take her on shopping trips to Panjim, and essentially the lord and master. Vijay is that, although, it appears, a just and loving one.

When Vijay’s teenage daughter gets into a situation with a boy, she calls in reinforcements, i.e.; her mother, because daddy is in the office watching movies, and has the phone off the hook. Mom and daughter, essentially abject and powerless, aren’t able to resolve the situation and Vijay must step in at the last moment. The boy goes missing, and soon Vijay and his family are being hounded by the police for answers, because as it turns out, the troublesome boy was the spoilt son of IG Police Meera Deshmukh (Tabu).

The first half of the film builds up slowly, with many of the qualities, especially pertaining to showing docile, powerless women, and omnipotent men, which set my teeth on edge. The second half is where Drishyam actually shines. The narrative is tight and Drishyam actually turns into an engrossing, tension-filled crime drama. It dwells upon the fine distinction between right and wrong, and shows a mirror to corrupt society, with its gender-insensitivity and weak justice system.

Ajay Devgn is one-dimensional as Vijay; there are no fine nuances to his family-man character that I could detect. His protagonist would have been a lot more interesting had we been privy to his inner struggle, which we weren’t. Shriya Saran I didn’t particularly care for either, although she played good-little-wifey to the hilt (which was probably what the director wanted). Tabu is great as always, but her character appears to veer between emotional mom and hard-hearted policewoman rather sharply – not her fault though, I think, the director’s. I actually liked Rajat Kapoor the best here, because of the way he inhabits the character he portrays, the father of the missing boy, yes, but also a decent human being.

I actually did like the film. My rating is not all that high though because there is an element of distaste, stemming from the fact that the film’s story revolves around a woman’s perceived honor in patriarchal Indian society, and the protagonist is an adherent of that regressive culture. It is not that other societies are not patriarchal, but combine Drishyam’s portrayal of abjectly powerless women literally on their knees, with its portrayal of young men powerfully drunk on liberal societal “boys-will-be-boys” sanction, and the film’s acceptance of the skewed status-quo (via the hero’s thought process), and it makes me want to retch.

This is still a decent film, so if you are on the fence, do watch it.

Kidwise: This film, as I said, is a tad distasteful. I can’t recommend it for a younger audience.