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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  DVD Review | Drishyam
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DVD Review | Drishyam

The Malayalam hit is now accessible to a wider audience, including fans of 'The Devotion of Suspect X'

Mohanlal (left) in a still from ‘Drishyam’ directed by Jeethu Joseph.Premium
Mohanlal (left) in a still from ‘Drishyam’ directed by Jeethu Joseph.

The movie that stormed the Malayalam box office last year, was remade into Telugu and Kannada, is being retooled in Tamil, and has been optioned for a Hindi version is very clever indeed. Drishyam is a murder mystery that’s not about the crime itself but about the alibi.

Mohanlal’s small-town and small-time cable television operator relies on his grey cells and cinephilia to keep his family from being imprisoned for a crime they are forced to commit. He refers to DVDs of movies he has watched in the past to come up with ways of staying ahead of the police. Try as we might, we didn’t spot a copy of the Japanese novel, The Devotion Of Suspect X, anywhere.

Although Drishyam’s director and writer, Jeethu Joseph, has stated in interviews that his movie doesn’t lift any ideas from Keigo Higashino’s best-selling 2005 thriller, the similarities are inescapable. Both are about a morally justified murder that is expertly covered. Both are about intelligent men who go to extreme lengths to protect the people they love. Both involve a game of wits that is played all the way down to the wire, with twists leaping off book and screen until the last page and frame.

In The Devotion Of Suspect X, brilliant mathematician Ishigami, who has lost his chance at national and possibly international glory, creates a near-perfect alibi to save his neighbour, whom he loves, and her teenage daughter from being indicted for the murder of the neighbour’s abusive former husband. The crime is presented as a necessary moral act, justified under the circumstances, and therefore worthy of Ishigami’s diabolical acts of subterfuge, which only the equally brilliant physicist and his former classmate Yukawa can unravel.

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The cerebral contest in the original novel is replaced here by the competing needs of two families. The teenager who threatens Georgekutty’s sense of well-being, which is lovingly explored for close to an hour before the plot kicks in, is the son of a top-ranking police officer. She marshals a crack team to shake down the family’s alibi, and Drishyam creates ample suspense over whether Georgekutty and family will make it past the finishing line. It’s an absorbing watch despite its forbidding 164-minute running length and tendency to overplay its hand even for those who have read the unacknowledged source novel.

The narrative is backed by smart directorial choices and fine acting by the peerless Mohanlal. The small-town setting and empathetic depiction of Georgekutty’s personal problems—he is financially strapped but resents the offer of help from his in-laws—allow for greater identification with his character. If The Devotion Of Suspect X is marked by economy, Drishyam is far more languorous, building up to the murder and its concealment gradually, and only after viewers have fallen in love with Georgekutty and family. While Ishigami sometimes seems more man than machine, Georgekutty is depicted as a plump mass of sweetness who deserves to serve no jail time whatsoever for his role in a cover-up.

Drishyam has been remade in Kannada and Telugu, and its Tamil version, starring local thespian Kamal Haasan, is under way. Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Telefilms has bought the rights to the source novel in Japanese, which became accessible to international audiences through a translation, with Kahaani director Sujoy Ghosh being attached to the project. There have been news reports that Kapoor has sent a legal notice to the film-makers of Drishyam for beating her to it. She needn’t worry too much. Ghosh’s Kahaani borrowed ideas from the Hollywood movie Taking Lives without a hitch, and some of the plot developments and characters rejected by Drishyam in its bid to be “original" can easily be reintroduced in the Hindi version. Completists will do well to read the novel if they haven’t already, watch Drishyam’s subtitled DVD and then troop in for the Hindi remake to watch a truly ingenious mesh of twists and turns, all the handiwork of Higashino’s cold, logic-driven plotting.

Drishyam, Central Home Entertainment, 130, English subtitles, all regions.

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Published: 12 Aug 2014, 05:55 PM IST
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