Drishyam 2 Review: Drishyam Sequel Groans For Relevance

Drishyam2(Amazon Prime)

Starring  Mohanlal, Meena, Ansiba Hassan,Esther Anil

Rating: **

Sequels, by their very nature, are a redundant breed. They are made  not because they must, but because they are  the need of the  hour.  The Drishyam sequel  spends  more than  an hour of its 3.5 hours playing-time telling us nothing  about  Georgekutty and his family that we don’t already know(we’ve seen Mohanlal, Kamal Haasan and Ajay Devgan  playing Georgekutty)  except that they love one another, that the mother is strictly conservative with their two daughters  while the  father is winkingly  liberal  with them. That that they banter among themselves  about  Georgekutty’s  ambitions to  turn a  film producer.

All this  makes for a  good  diversion for those familiar with the  characters, though  it says nothing new, nothing here warrants a revisit into this wholesome  family with  dark secret(hint: a  burial in a most unlikely  place).

When the  heat kicks in and the  plot propels ahead like  a drunken monk , the  incidents in  the  second-half  feel like  the  plot  being stretched just to stay relevant.  There are two sets  of infiltrators  here trying to excavate the dark secret from Georgekutty’s family.  The  conspiratorial thrust never quite makes the inroads into the narrative that sequel aficionados  had hoped for. 

New characters like  a battling couple Saritha(Anjali Nair) and  Sabu (Sumesh Chandran)  who move  nextdoor to  Georgekutty’s, bring  no  charm  or  intrigue to the proceedings. They are  just devices to  breathe  life into a  plot that was dead  and buried six years  ago.

Suddenly an eyewitness Jose(Ajith Koothattukulam) claiming to know  what Georgekutty  did with the corpse  of his elder daughter’s sex predator(Drishyam , the original) that fateful  night six years  ago, shows up like an unworthy messiah. Where was he all this time?  In jail! Ah, I see. And I hear. The sequel’s awakening sense  of foreboding comes a  bit too late after our attention has  been dragged  too deep into an agreeable  state.

  What  really works in favour of this poor sequel are the  actors. Mohanlal  of course is  the master  of understatement.  For him less has always been more. Unfortunately the same cannot be said  of  the  film where  the paucity  of renewed  vigour  dampens  the sequel’s spirit. By the time  a resolution is reached, writer-directorJeethu Josesh exhausts his  narrative with repetition: the same chai-dhaba with the townsfolks gossiping about Georgekutty(did  he , or didn’t he?) and his  newly-found ill-concealed  affluence, the same  climax where the  mother of  the  murdered  boy(Asha Sarath, making a belated entry) slaps up  Georgekutty’s family trying to force  a confession  out  of them while the  officer  on duty(Murali  Gopi,  excellent) looks on stoically.

 But  Georgekutty  is made  of sterner stuff,  He has trained his family well to kept its peace about the family secret. If only the sequel to the  much-acclaimed film  showed  as much discipline  and self-restrain as its protagonist!