The business model of sequels is to mint money by reusing everything from characters to themes to worlds to sell to an invested audience, inherently reducing the risk for the producer. I am assuming that the first Drishyam in all likelihood was never conceived to a be a franchise from the structure of the plot and the narrative and if I recall the director’s statements from an interview correctly, the idea of a sequel was prompted by the producer. Drishyam 2 streamed on OTT during the pandemic and was a different beast entirely. It was built to indulge and please an eager audience, designed for the protagonist to win, the payoff was the how. In Drishyam 3 Jeethu Joseph has tried to bring the best of both worlds of his own creation from his two previous outings with Georgekutty and family.

You understand the grip the franchise has on the imagination of the audience in Kerala when you see that even the most reluctant of moviegoers have watched the film before the weekend was over. The responses were contrasting. Some loved it, some felt letdown. I must admit that I belong to the latter category. Even more so because the first half of the film belonged to the Drishyam 1 ecosystem and set my hopes high for a payoff that never quite arrived. For me the most significant factor was Jeethu Joseph’s decision as a writer to make Georgekutty face the consequences of his actions and to make him realise it’s ramifications on the lives of others who were dragged into his ring of fire for no fault of theirs and entirely by his design. The character study at play here in the first half is probably the best of the entire franchise but apparently in a desperation to stick to the template of the Drishyam movies as we as an audience have come to expect, the writer goes for trade-offs and compromises in the second half. In doing so he does injustices not just to Georgekutty but to few other significant characters to the point that you feel that they’ve broken character, so to speak and that you’re watching another movie entirely. Yes he does try to salvage towards the end but then you have already chewed on the cardamom in the proverbial biriyani and the aftertaste is all that remains.

It’s no exaggeration when I say that no other actor could embody Georgekutty as we have come to know him. The Georgekutty in this film is probably the most challenging role to have come Mohanlal’s way in a long time. His brand of acting makes most roles look easy and for me the role was cakewalk for him in the first two films. But the Georgekutty here is almost unrecognizable and Mohanlal is in elements when he takes the audience on a journey into the conflicted, remorseful mind of Georgekutty. Even when the plot and the direction is at it’s weakest the actor brings his A game to rescue the scene and the movie ultimately. While the writing for Meena’s and Anisba’s characters leave little room for them to go beyond the franchise template, Jeethu Joseph has decided to flesh out Esther Anil’s character and if a D4 is on the cards, one gets an inkling that her character might play a more key role. D3 could have been what Chenkol was to Kireedam or even more. Now that the cash registers have rung voices of discontent can be drowned but one does hope that it’s not entirely lost on the ears of the writer and the director, for it comes from a place of love for the character and film.