The final Drishyam chapter returns to Vijay Salgaonkar’s world of lies, memory and moral ambiguity, writes Arnab Banerjee, as Abhishek Pathak explores whether a carefully constructed story can ultimately overpower the truth itself while testing memory and justice.

Story and Direction: Abhishek Pathak

Screenplay: Abhishek Pathak, Aamil Keeyan Khan, Parveez Shaikh

Starring: Ajay Devgn, Jaideep Ahlawat, Tabu, Shriya Saran, Rajat Kapoor, Prakash Raj, Ishita Dutta, Mrunal Jadhav

Cinematography: Sudhir K. Chaudhary

Duration: 150 minutes

Rating: ★★★

Ajay Devgn returns as Vijay Salgaonkar in Drishyam: The Conclusion, the third and final chapter of the Hindi-language Drishyam franchise, directed by Abhishek Pathak. Tabu, Shriya Saran, Ishita Dutta and Rajat Kapoor reprise their roles, while Jaideep Ahlawat and Prakash Raj join the ensemble as the story moves towards its promised denouement. The franchise has always revolved around a deceptively unsettling question: if a lie is constructed convincingly enough, can it eventually become indistinguishable from truth? The concluding chapter now has the unenviable task of giving that question a final dramatic meaning.

When Lies Become Alternative Realities

Few contemporary Indian thrillers have been as fascinated by the malleability of truth as Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam. First made in Malayalam and subsequently remade in several Indian languages, the franchise derives its enduring appeal from a simple but provocative premise: what if an ordinary man could manufacture an alternative reality so convincing that the truth itself became almost irrelevant? The Hindi films, led by Ajay Devgn in the role originated by Mohanlal, have developed their own mythology around that idea.

Vijay Salgaonkar is hardly the conventional cinematic mastermind. He is a modestly educated family man, an obsessive consumer of films and a man whose greatest apparent virtue is his devotion to his wife and daughters. When circumstances place his family in mortal danger, however, his knowledge of cinema becomes an unlikely education in deception. He does not merely invent an alibi; he constructs an entire parallel reality, complete with dates, locations, witnesses and memories, and persuades everyone around him to inhabit it.

The Moral Cost Of Survival

The original moral equation was already deeply unstable. The young man whose death Vijay conceals is himself a predator, and his killing is accidental. The family is therefore not simply hiding a crime; it is attempting to protect itself from what it perceives as a greater threat. Drishyam has always drawn its tension from precisely this moral dissonance. The audience knows the truth, sympathises with those concealing it and nevertheless watches uneasily as truth is systematically subordinated to survival.

Drishyam: The Conclusion returns to that moral fault line rather than abandoning it. The past, despite Vijay’s elaborate efforts to bury it beneath layers of fabricated memory, remains stubbornly alive. Indeed, the deeper he retreats into the architecture of his own deception, the more precarious that architecture becomes.

There are only so many versions of the same story Vijay can construct before the abundance of his explanations begins to look suspicious. His wife Nandini (Shriya Saran) and daughters Anju (Ishita Dutta) and Anu (Mrunal Jadhav) remain bound to the secret, while Meera (Tabu) and Mahesh (Rajat Kapoor), still consumed by the loss of their son, refuse to accept that the case has reached its natural conclusion. Grief, in the Drishyam universe, is not merely an emotional state; it becomes an investigative force.

A New Investigator Enters

Into this increasingly fragile equilibrium comes Rajveer (Jaideep Ahlawat), a new police officer convinced that the original investigation left crucial questions unanswered. He tells Meera and Mahesh that he has unearthed information that previously escaped scrutiny. His arrival provides the concluding chapter with a fresh investigative axis while returning the story to its oldest question: can an invented truth withstand sustained scrutiny indefinitely?

This is where the franchise remains more interesting than its mechanics might initially suggest. Its suspense does not depend solely on whether the police will discover what happened. The more unsettling question is whether truth possesses any intrinsic power once an alternative version of reality has been made sufficiently persuasive.

Vijay’s genius, if it can be called that, lies not in erasing the truth but in overwhelming it with detail. He understands that people rarely experience reality as a complete, objective record. They remember fragments, trust appearances and construct narratives from whatever evidence is available. Vijay exploits precisely that human vulnerability. His alibi succeeds because it does not merely conceal facts; it manufactures memories.

The Challenge Of Franchise Fatigue

The concluding chapter consequently faces a difficult balancing act. It must deliver the pleasures of another cat-and-mouse thriller without reducing Vijay’s predicament to a mechanical repetition of the earlier films. It must also confront the inevitable problem of franchise fatigue: how many times can the same deception be revisited before its dramatic potency begins to diminish?

What remains compelling about Vijay is the contradiction at the centre of his character. He is simultaneously victim and manipulator, protector and deceiver. His actions originate in familial love but require an increasingly elaborate campaign of dishonesty. The films ask us to understand him without necessarily absolving him, and that distinction remains crucial.

Ajay Devgn’s Deliberate Restraint

It is not merely difficult, but almost impossible for any actor to stand shoulder to shoulder with Mohanlal, whose towering interpretation of Vijay has become inseparable from the character itself. Ajay Devgn, reprising the role in the Hindi adaptation, consequently carries an unavoidable burden of comparison. Whether by instinct or design, he avoids that contest. Devgn chooses restraint as his principal strategy: minimal gesture, measured speech, an impassive gaze and a studied refusal to advertise what lies beneath the surface.

What is often described as “internalisation” or “underplaying” is, in Devgn’s case, also a remarkably safe acting choice. The less he reveals, the less there is to measure against Mohanlal. Yet, paradoxically, the strategy works. Devgn’s stillness acquires a certain authority within the film’s grammar. Vijay is a man who has spent years constructing elaborate lies and policing his own reactions; emotional opacity is therefore entirely compatible with the character.

Jaideep Ahlawat Raises The Temperature

The moment Jaideep Ahlawat enters the frame, however, the temperature changes. Ahlawat is an instinctive and resourceful performer, and the screenplay gives him several of the film’s most substantial dramatic encounters. He does not need to announce Rajveer’s intelligence or authority; both register through physical presence, vocal modulation and minute shifts in demeanour. One consequently finds oneself waiting for Ahlawat to return.

Devgn’s performance is built around withholding, while Ahlawat’s derives its energy from discovery and engagement. The contrast is revealing. Devgn’s calculated minimalism may be the safest way of inhabiting a role forever shadowed by Mohanlal’s definitive performance, and it works within this film. But Ahlawat reminds us how much an actor can achieve in the spaces between the lines.

Tabu’s Grief Becomes Counterweight

Tabu brings an entirely different emotional temperature. Her Meera remains the franchise’s moral counterweight: a grieving mother, a former police officer and a woman who has never accepted the version of events presented to her. Her pursuit of Vijay is driven by more than vengeance. It is an attempt to restore a version of reality in which her son’s death has an explanation and those responsible cannot simply disappear behind an impenetrable wall of manufactured evidence.

The concluding film therefore inherits a universe in which nobody possesses an uncomplicated claim on truth. Vijay has his aversion. Meera has hers. The police have evidence. The family has memory. Somewhere between these competing constructions lies the event itself — increasingly distant, increasingly obscured and perhaps less consequential than the stories people have built around it.

The Story Becomes The Truth

That remains the enduring fascination of Drishyam: not simply whether truth will eventually emerge, but whether people can continue living once they have learned to believe a carefully constructed lie. Drishyam: The Conclusion does not entirely escape the limitations of returning to familiar ground, but it understands that the franchise’s real subject was never the crime itself. It was the extraordinary power of storytelling — and the uncomfortable possibility that, in the end, the story we choose to believe may matter more than what actually happened.