There is an unusual burden attached to concluding Drishyam. For 11 years, Vijay Salgaonkar has survived through the power of a convincing story. The franchise has made audiences repeatedly wonder whether truth can be defeated by a well-constructed lie. Drishyam: The Conclusion, directed by Abhishek Pathak, brings that experiment to its final Hindi chapter, with Ajay Devgn returning as Vijay, Tabu as Meera Deshmukh and Jaideep Ahlawat joining the franchise as crime branch officer Rajveer Singh Tomar.
The film’s most significant achievement is that it does not simply reproduce the Malayalam continuation; it attempts to give the Hindi version its own conclusion. Its biggest problem, however, is that its ambition to deliver a spectacular final game of wits comes at the expense of the emotional complexity that once made Vijay so compelling.
A manufactured reality
The film begins with Meera still consumed by the unresolved death of her son, Sameer. With Vijay and his family having escaped prosecution, a fresh investigation is mounted with Rajveer Singh Tomar at its centre. Tomar is convinced that the Salgaonkars’s seemingly perfect story contains weaknesses and he begins systematically testing their version of events. Vijay, meanwhile, knows that the greatest danger is not the discovery of one piece of evidence but the collapse of the entire narrative he has constructed.
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Pathak, working with co-writers Aamil Keeyan Khan and Parveez Shaikh, uses this setup to turn the film into another battle of anticipation: the investigator tries to predict Vijay’s moves while Vijay tries to predict what the investigator already knows.
This is where the film’s central idea remains strongest. Vijay does not merely conceal evidence; he manufactures a reality that other people can believe. Movies have taught him how stories work, how audiences process information and how apparently unrelated details can be arranged into a convincing sequence. Drishyam: The Conclusion understands that Vijay’s real weapon is therefore narrative control. The film becomes a contest between an official investigation and a privately manufactured version of reality.
Jaideep Ahlawat gives that contest much-needed unpredictability. His Rajveer is more aggressive and visibly confident than the restrained Vijay, creating a useful contrast between two different kinds of intelligence. Devgn plays Vijay with familiar minimalism, allowing small changes in expression to suggest constant calculation, while Ahlawat gives the investigation a more confrontational energy.
The cost of living a lie
Yet the screenplay does not make enough of the people caught between these two men. This is particularly damaging because the emotional foundation of Drishyam has always been Vijay’s family. After 11 years of living under the possibility of exposure, their fear, guilt and exhaustion should be central to the conclusion. Instead, they frequently become spectators to Vijay’s latest manoeuvres. In that, the thriller keeps asking whether Vijay will escape, but rarely asks what surviving this way has done to him and his family.
The same problem affects Tabu’s Meera. She has one of the franchise’s most potentially complicated positions: she is grieving, she wants justice for her son and she believes Vijay has escaped accountability. Tabu gives the character the necessary weight, but the screenplay increasingly treats her grief as an engine for the investigation rather than something worth examining in itself. The result is a film with considerable plot movement but less emotional movement.
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Pathak’s direction is similarly strongest when he embraces the mechanics of the thriller. The courtroom confrontations, strategic revelations and final twists are staged for maximum audience response. Similarly, the pacing becomes a significant weakness. The film has enough material for a gripping final act, but it sometimes mistakes complication for suspense. The first half spends considerable time arranging pieces whose importance becomes clear only later, while the climax accelerates into the sort of twist-heavy spectacle the franchise has trained its audience to expect. The payoff is energetic, but the journey is less consistently engaging.
The film’s most interesting failure, however, is philosophical. The earlier Drishyam films derived much of their power from the uncomfortable position they placed the audience in: we knew Vijay was manipulating the justice system, yet we wanted him to succeed because we understood his motive. Drishyam: The Conclusion retains that contradiction but does not interrogate it as sufficiently as it should have.