Drishyam: The Conclusion

Vijay Salgaonkar’s mind hasn’t stopped ticking for over a decade now. Thinking two steps ahead of the law every living second, he expects the Damocles sword hanging above his head to drop any day and destroy the people he so intently protects. It’s a dysfunctional dynamic to function in but the Salgaonkars don’t mind so long as they survive the storm as a close-knit family. At what cost? The makers of Drishyam do not ask. Over the course of these 11 years, they’ve started to resemble apparitions going around in circles and conning the cops as a team. The ghost of Sameer Deshmukh’s unresolved mystery continues to loom large over the franchise, which arrives at its conclusion in the final instalment of the trilogy.

‘शब्दों में झूठ छुपने की जगह ढूंढ़ लेते हैं, लेकिन दृश्य कभी झूठ नहीं बोलते।’ लोगों की आम धारणा यही होती है कि आंखों देखा कभी झूठ नहीं होता। इसी सोच का फायदा उठाकर साल 2015 में गोवा के विजय सलगांवकर ने ‘दृश्यम’ का ऐसा खेल रचा कि सारी पुलिस और सिस्टम के सच धराशाई हो गए। दर्शक इस चौथी फेल के जबरा फैन हो गए। अब ‘दृश्यम’ के उसी चक्रव्यूह के साथ विजय आखिरी बार पर्दे पर उतरा है। इसलिए, लोगों का उत्साह चरम पर है और सच कहें तो थोड़ा गिरते-पड़ते, बाल-बाल बचते, आखिर में इस बार भी उसने बाजी मार ली है।

For over a decade, Vijay Salgaonkar used cinematic logic along with the shared memory of October 2nd to build an impregnable fortress around his family that the law simply couldn’t touch. But every perfect alibi has an expiration date. Drishyam The Conclusion marks the moment director Abhishek Pathak cuts the umbilical cord to the Malayalam mothership and finds its feet in the grit and grandeur of the Hindi heartland. What distinguishes the franchise from a standard police procedural is its investigation of manufactured hyperreality. A story doesn’t need to be true; it just has to feel credible. It plays on a fundamental rule of human psychology: people believe what makes sense to them.