Cast: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Shriya Saran, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rajat Kapoor, Ishita Dutta, Mrunal Jadhav & Prakash Raj Directed by: Abhishek Pat...
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Shriya Saran, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rajat Kapoor, Ishita Dutta, Mrunal Jadhav & Prakash Raj
Directed by: Abhishek Pathak
Shah Rukh Khan had once said in a film, “Never underestimate the power of a common man.” It was said in a comic context then, almost as a throwaway line. In the world of Drishyam, however, the sentence acquires an entirely different resonance. For Vijay Salgaonkar, the common man is not merely an ordinary citizen caught in extraordinary circumstances. He is a man who has discovered, almost to his own surprise, how far an ordinary human being can travel when the safety of his family is at stake.
The first Drishyam was about instinct. The second was about preparation. Drishyam 3 is about endurance.
Because by the time we arrive at the third chapter, Vijay has already done what most people would consider impossible. He has lied, manipulated, anticipated, reconstructed and outthought an entire system in order to protect his family. He has lived with the knowledge that one mistake can bring everything crashing down. What makes the third film interesting is that the danger is no longer simply about concealing what happened. It is about surviving the consequences of having survived it once already.
The Hindi Drishyam 3 also wisely chooses not to follow the narrative of the Malayalam third instalment. It takes the characters and the history of the Hindi films and develops a different story from them. That is perhaps the most sensible route the franchise could have taken. To simply reproduce another version of the Malayalam story would have reduced this film to a comparison exercise. Instead, the film continues the Hindi franchise on its own terms.
And those terms are more often than not ruthless.
Vijay and his family are once again poked and prodded by Meera Deshmukh and her husband Mahesh. But this time they are not alone. The investigation acquires a different weight with the arrival of senior police official Rajveer Tomar and, later, public prosecutor Indrajit Shetty, whose presence brings an entirely different kind of menace into the proceedings. Meera makes it clear that she is no longer merely interested in justice. She wants revenge.
That one distinction changes the emotional equation. Justice, at least theoretically, is supposed to be impersonal. Revenge is personal. Justice asks what happened. Revenge asks what must be done to the person responsible. And when the person being pursued is Vijay Salgaonkar, a man who has spent two films converting the smallest details into instruments of survival, the conflict becomes less a conventional police-versus-criminal investigation and more a battle of minds.
The screenplay by Parveez Shaikh and Aameel Khan, with additional inputs from Abhishek Pathak, understands the history of the franchise remarkably well. The intelligence of the writing lies in the way it sieves through the intricacies of the first two chapters and uses them as building blocks for the third. The earlier films are not treated merely as backstory. They become evidence.
Every little detail matters. Every apparently insignificant piece of information that Vijay has accumulated over the years can potentially become a weapon—or a liability. The screenplay continually moves backwards in order to move forwards, revisiting the architecture of the earlier films without simply repeating it. This is not a franchise that has forgotten what happened before. On the contrary, it understands that the audience remembers.
And that creates one of the film’s greatest challenges.
How do you surprise an audience that has already been trained to distrust every piece of information placed before it?
The answer is by making the audience suspicious of everything.
The film’s intelligence comes from this constant uncertainty. You know Vijay. You know what he is capable of. You know that he thinks several moves ahead. But you also know that the people coming after him know this now. The advantage that Vijay possessed in the first two films—the advantage of being underestimated—is slowly disappearing.
This time the people hunting him know exactly what kind of man they are dealing with.
And Vijay knows that they know.
That is where Drishyam 3 becomes genuinely fascinating.
The film begins with a sense of impending trouble rather than immediately throwing us into it. There is a deliberate dramatic quality to the opening as Meera’s determination is established and Rajveer Tomar enters the picture. The net does not suddenly appear around Vijay. It is slowly constructed. One thread here. Another there. A question. A contradiction. A recollection. A detail from the past suddenly acquiring significance in the present.
The suspense comes not from asking whether Vijay is hiding something. We already know he is.
It comes from asking whether, this time, he has hidden enough. That is a much more interesting question.
Ajay Devgn understands Vijay Salgaonkar better now than he did when he first played him. There is almost no conventional heroism in the performance. Vijay doesn’t swagger. He doesn’t announce his intelligence. He doesn’t need to. Devgn has built the character around stillness—the measured pauses, the watchful eyes, the slight hesitation before answering a question. Vijay is always calculating, but the performance never makes the calculation visible enough for us to feel that we are watching an actor demonstrating cleverness. We are watching a man trying desperately not to look clever.
And perhaps the most interesting aspect of Devgn’s performance in this film is the fatigue underneath Vijay’s composure. The first two films were about a man discovering how far he could go to protect his family. By the third, one senses the cost of having gone that far. There is an emotional weariness in Vijay that sits beneath the surface of his calm. He knows that there may no longer be an easy way out.
He even prepares his family for the possibility that this time intelligence alone may not be sufficient.
They may need luck.
That is an important admission from a man whose entire mythology has been built around planning.
Vijay has always believed in controlling the narrative. In Drishyam 3, the narrative begins to acquire a life of its own.
Tabu’s Meera Deshmukh is equally interesting because the character has travelled a considerable emotional distance from the grieving mother we encountered earlier. Grief has hardened into purpose. The distinction between justice and revenge becomes increasingly blurred, and Tabu plays that transition without resorting to theatricality. There is anger there, but there is also something more complicated—the refusal to allow herself to move on.
Rajat Kapoor’s Mahesh carries a different kind of emotional burden. His presence is quieter, but that quietness is precisely what makes the Deshmukh marriage interesting within the larger conflict. They are united by grief, but grief does not necessarily manifest itself in identical ways. Unlike the earlier two instalments where Mahesh seemed the pacifier as opposed to Meera’s aggressor, he is in fact calming shots this time.
And then there is Rajveer Tomar (Jaideep Ahlawat). He brings to the film what a character of this nature needs: authority without unnecessary noise. Tomar is not simply another policeman brought in because the franchise requires a fresh investigator. His presence changes the balance of power. Vijay is accustomed to being the smartest person in the room. Tomar makes that assumption less comfortable.
The second half introduces Indrajith Shetty (Prakash Raj), the public prosecutor who gives the film another tonal and intellectual shift. He is colourful, ruthless and smooth, but the performance never becomes a caricature. The pleasure of the character lies in watching someone who understands that truth inside a courtroom is not necessarily identical to truth outside it.
And this brings us to the central idea of Drishyam 3.
Truth is relative.
Not necessarily in the philosophical sense, but in the cinematic world that Vijay inhabits. Truth depends upon who is telling it, how it is being presented, what evidence accompanies it and, perhaps most importantly, who is controlling the frame.
That is why the title Drishyam has always been more meaningful than it first appeared.
What we see is not necessarily what happened.
What happened is not necessarily what can be proved. And what can be proved is not necessarily what everyone will believe.
The third film takes this idea and stretches it further than the previous two. Perhaps too far at times.
That is also the film’s biggest vulnerability. The entire Drishyam premise has always required us to accept a certain degree of narrative improbability. Vijay’s genius is part of the pleasure. But when you keep escalating the circumstances around the same man, there inevitably comes a point when the audience begins asking not whether Vijay can possibly escape, but whether the screenplay is asking us to believe too much.
The film is aware of that danger. It repeatedly acknowledges that the Salgaonkars are living on borrowed time. Vijay himself understands that. The question is not whether the situation is plausible in a documentary sense. The question is whether the emotional and narrative logic remains convincing.
For the most part, it does.
And that is where Abhishek Pathak’s direction and Aameel Khan and Parveez Shaikh’s script deserves credit.
The film is remarkably disciplined for a mainstream Hindi thriller of this scale. There is little interest in unnecessary spectacle. There are hardly any conventional action diversions. The film doesn’t need a hero to punch his way out of a problem. It doesn’t need songs to interrupt the narrative. It doesn’t need characters screaming at one another to manufacture intensity.
Its weapon is information. And its ammunition is silence.
That restraint becomes particularly valuable in the second half. The pressure on Vijay and his family becomes almost relentless, yet the film refuses to turn every confrontation into a shouting match. People listen. People watch. People wait. And sometimes the most frightening moment is simply a character asking a seemingly harmless question. This is why the pacing works.
The film is not necessarily fast throughout. It is tense.
There is a difference.
Fast films move quickly. Tense films make you want the next scene to arrive quickly. Drishyam 3 understands the latter. It allows certain scenes to breathe because suspense requires anticipation. If everything is frantic, nothing feels dangerous. The film knows that sometimes the best way to tighten the noose is simply to allow us to watch it being tightened.
The climax is therefore not merely a final twist inserted because a Drishyam film must have one. It is the culmination of the film’s larger argument about perception, evidence and storytelling. It jolts, certainly, but its greater satisfaction comes from the way it forces us to reconsider what we thought we understood.
And then comes the curious emotional response that the franchise has always generated. We know Vijay has done wrong. We know that. And yet we want him to succeed. That moral contradiction is the secret of Drishyam.
The films never ask us to believe that Vijay is innocent in the conventional sense. They ask us to understand him. His crime is inseparable from his love for his family. The audience therefore finds itself in an uncomfortable position, emotionally siding with a man whose actions cannot be morally simplified.
That is why the phrase about the common man assumes such significance here.
How far can an ordinary man go to protect the people he loves?
The first film asked the question.
The second answered it.
The third asks what happens when the consequences of that answer refuse to disappear.
And perhaps this is why the third film feels more stimulating than the previous two. Vijay isn’t merely fighting the police. He is fighting time, memory, evidence, circumstance and the accumulated weight of his own decisions.
There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about the film’s faith in the thriller as a genre. It believes that audiences will sit patiently and watch a story unfold if the story gives them a reason to keep watching. In an era where spectacle is often mistaken for scale, Drishyam 3 demonstrates that a room, a conversation, a file, a photograph or a single sentence can sometimes carry more suspense than an entire action sequence.
And that makes its opening significant as well.
The film has taken a fantastic initial, and one of the most heartening things about that response is seeing a clever script, assured direction and superb performances receiving commercial appreciation. There is hardly any fighting, hardly any conventional song-and-dance interruption and absolutely no need for screaming and shouting to announce that something important is happening.
And yet the film works. More importantly, it works because it trusts its story.
That is perhaps what makes the response to Drishyam 3 particularly encouraging. The audience has not needed mindless masala, exaggerated action or spectacle to be drawn into a mainstream Hindi film. A well-written thriller, built around characters, intelligence, suspense and the gradual accumulation of tension, has been enough.
Good content, when presented with conviction, does not necessarily need to shout. Sometimes it only needs to whisper.
Drishyam 3 does stretch the elastic almost to breaking point. At moments one wonders whether it can possibly hold. Whether Vijay has finally run out of roads, explanations and exits.
Fortunately, it doesn’t snap.
It holds. And how.
Because at its heart, Drishyam 3 is not really about whether a man can outsmart the system one more time. It is about the terrifying extent of what an ordinary man can become when the people he loves are placed on one side and everything else in the world is placed on the other.
Vijay Salgaonkar chose his side a long time ago.
The third film simply asks how much longer he can survive the consequences of that choice.
And in doing so, Drishyam 3 gives this unlikely Hindi franchise a conclusion that is as much about perception as it is about crime, as much about family as it is about law, and ultimately, as much about the stories we tell ourselves as the truth we are desperately trying to hide. And what a heady cocktail it is indeed!!!
By Pratik Majumdar (author: Love Coffee Murder and 1975 The Year That Transformed Bollywood)
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