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The story of an ordinary man from a small town in Kerala, who fights tooth and nail to safeguard his family, has ended up breaking box office records in every language it was remade. Including Chinese! Who would have thought. The 2013 Malayalam film Drishyam, a murder mystery written and directed by Jeethu Joseph, was a slow burner that revolved around a cable operator who lives a quiet life with his wife and two daughters. An accidental murder at the hands of his daughter forces him not just to cover up the crime and protect his daughter’s reputation, but also hatch a masterplan to safeguard his family from the police. While it was the first Malayalam film to collect Rs 50 crore at the box office, besides winning several national and state awards, the film was also remade in Kannada (Drishya, 2014), Telugu (Drushyam, 2014), Tamil (Papanasam, 2015), and Drishyam in Hindi (2015). Subsequently, it also crossed borders to be remade in Sinhalese and Chinese.
The film’s second part, Drishyam 2, came eight years later. While the Malayalam version which released directly on OTT was appreciated, the Hindi Drishyam 2 has been declared the third highest grossing Hindi film of 2022. So what has made the Drishyam franchise so popular?
What strikes you first and foremost about Georgekutty (Mohanlal) is his ordinariness. There isn’t a crumb of heroism about him. An orphan and a school dropout who runs a cable TV service, he guards his family fiercely and seems rather content with his life. A large part of Georgekutty’s perception about life comes from his own upbringing and his obsession with cinema. He watches films religiously, so much so that he often stays at his office overnight to catch films, absorbing them like a sponge. But even his love for his family is neatly aligned with the principles of patriarchy. Georgekutty’s wife Rani (Meena), apparently more educated than him, has happily filled in as the caregiver, only occasionally complaining about his unavailability.
In an earlier scene, when Georgekutty runs home to Rani after watching a steamy movie scene at night, she is surprisingly compliant, accepting this noticeably selfish habit with playfulness. That she is available whenever he needs her, which is not necessarily the case the other way around, shows how unevenly their marriage is tethered. So the scene where Rani ribs him about his lack of expertise in bed comes across as surprising, as does his reaction to it. The film pulls off the husband-wife bickering well, with a touch of native humour. Despite Georgekutty’s attempts to be stern, eventually it is Rani who wins. But surprisingly, some of these nuances are left out of the Hindi version though.
Look out for the scene when Rani demands a day out to do some shopping and catch a movie. Georgekutty looks outraged, not even realising that he is being an extremely miserly spouse. Such Georgekuttys are dime a dozen in Kerala’s cultural milieu. He can be seen in several middle-class households, where the men hold the money strings and expect the women to be proficient in budgeting.
Georgekutty’s idea of a partner is more than apparent in the way he considers actor Biju Menon to be lucky to have a partner like Samyukta Varma, since she sits at home and takes care of their family. Interestingly, Jeethu lets Rani counter that with a — “Well, Biju Menon is a rich man who will provide her with all the luxury she needs.”
Rani is a traditional homemaker, who aligns with patriarchal values and thinks that her daughters should speak, dress, and live a certain way. She disapproves of her younger daughter’s streak of rebellion (Drishyam 2) and worries about finding a groom for the elder one.
In Drishyam, Jeethu builds their world lazily, to the point that until the reveal happens, we seem to be watching a cosy family drama. It is this deliberate sluggishness of the narrative, introducing us to a family who could well have been our neighbours for years, that makes it easier to buy into and sympathise with their predicament when the story takes an unexpected twist. They are a typical traditional, god-fearing, Christian middle-class family who has always lived by upholding the sanctity of a family unit and is terrified of being judged by the society.
So when the mother and daughter pleadingly negotiate with Varun over the nude video clip, we understand. Perhaps, that is exactly what a lot of us will do. It’s a shattering blow for a family like this to have their daughter’s chastity being questioned. It is about family honour. It just so happens that in the film’s context, it is also about hiding a murder.
When Georgekutty comes up with a plan to cover up the murder, there is no bravura, just genuine, frightening helplessness to safeguard his family. When a man gathers all his wits to fight for his family, that instantly resonates with the audience. This is most likely why its remakes struck gold in every language, including Chinese. “I don’t think he is a criminal. Georgekutty is a family man; he loves his family dearly. When a crisis arises, he fights back with all the knowledge he has. And he gets lucky, that’s it,” was what Jeethu Joseph told this writer in a recent interview.
The other key players in the film also come from a place of vulnerability. The arrogant, self-assured IG Geetha Prabhakar (Asha Sharath) is ready to bend rules to find her son. Maternal love has affected her ability to think rationally. She is depicted as a fiercely protective mother who will go to any extent to find her child, no holds barred.
But in the Hindi version, the character’s (Tabu as Meera Deshmukh) ruthlessness is more effectively established through her introduction scene. There are more layers to Meera’s character here than that of just an overprotective mother.
Georgekutty and Geetha are in a way fighting for the same entity — family. But we end up empathising with Georgekutty because we think the odds are stacked against him, in a situation that is not of his making. The power imbalance easily tilts us in favour of the underdog. Also, subliminally, we are already with Georgekutty in this fight. Geetha, meanwhile, is deliberately coated with a layer of negative aggression that makes it easier for the audience to dislike her.
“He is a man who has sworn to protect his family at any cost. We can’t win this,” IG Thomas Bastin (Murali Gopy) says by the end of Drishyam 2. This effectively sums up the pull of Drishyam — an ordinary man waging a battle to protect his family at all costs. And as Georgekutty walks back after winning round two of this cat-and-mouse game, you have a feeling (as IG Thomas says) he is already making plans to offset their next attack.
Mohanlal embodies Georgekutty with understated ease, never letting us read his mind, yet making us aware of his emotional turmoil. Having said that, Kamal Haasan in the Tamil remake (Papanasam, also the only remake directed by Jeethu) managed to bring a tenderness to the father-daughter bond which was missing in the original. However, Mohanlal aced the climax speech in Drishyam, which Kamal took to the realm of histrionics. Ajay Devgn and Venkatesh fit well in the Hindi and Telugu versions respectively, while Meena convincingly (though her makeup was slightly off) pulled off Rani in both Malayalam and Telugu. Most of the remakes didn’t disappoint. They were also mostly scene-by-scene adaptations, with slight nips to cater to their respective milieus.
In an interview with Galatta Plus, Karan Johar said, “There is an academia to Drishyam Hindi version as well. Drishyam was hugely liked in theatres in 2015, hugely liked as satellite, and there is no Hindi dub of Drishyam online. Or available only in a subtitle version. If you are doing a remake, make sure you don’t have a Hindi dub available and that works (sic).”
The Sinhalese version, Dharmayuddhaya, is also said to be a scene-by-scene remake of the original. It was the second highest-grossing film in Sri Lanka and ran for 100 days (earned over 224 million). The film also won several awards in the country.
But the Chinese remake called Sheep Without a Shepherd, which was released in 2019, had a lot of changes from the original. In the film, the daughter is sexually assaulted at the summer camp and later blackmailed to exhort further sexual favours from her. The film ends with the protagonist confessing to the crime and ending up in jail. It also doesn’t fall into the trap of a rape-revenge narrative — a plot device that has spawned a whole subgenre of exploitation films until the recent past, including Malayalam’s 22 Female Kottayam (2012) and the much-feted Hindi film Bulbbul (2020). Instead, the film stresses on a family’s struggle to stay together. Sheep Without a Shepherd became the ninth highest grosser (192 million dollars) in China in 2019. Last year, the makers came up with a spiritual sequel called Fireflies in the Sun, which features the return of the former’s lead character.
The overwhelming success of the Drishyam franchise is a testimony to the universality of narratives that rally around mankind’s greatest strength and weakness — family. It would be unfair to call Georgekutty (Rambabu/ Vijay Salgaonkar/ Suyambu Lingam/ Rajendra Ponnappa) a classic criminal. He is an ordinary man who gained an immense amount of strength and courage from the fear of watching his family getting routed. More importantly, at every point in his journey, he was petrified, vulnerable, uncertain, and guilty, and yet he stuck to his guns. He defined human resilience.
Neelima Menon has worked in the newspaper industry for more than a decade. She has covered Hindi and Malayalam cinema for The New Indian Express and has worked briefly with Silverscreen.in. She now writes exclusively about Malayalam cinema, contributing to Fullpicture.in and thenewsminute.com. She is known for her detailed and insightful features on misogyny and the lack of representation of women in Malayalam cinema.