Rating: 2.5 stars
Drishyam2(Amazon Prime)
Starring Mohanlal, Meena, Ansiba Hassan, Esther Anil
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 Devgn 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 a dark secret (hint: burial in the 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 next door 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 s*x 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 favor 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-director Jeethu Joseph 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 keep its peace about the family secret. If only the sequel to the much-acclaimed film showed as much discipline and self-restraint as its protagonist!