The Difference Between Drishyam And Thudarum

The similarities between the two movies may be striking but where they differ is in the way each focuses your curiosity, observes Sreehari Nair.

While you may be tempted to think of Drishyam and Thudarum as 'blood brothers', there's a crucial difference between the two movies that makes them genealogically distinct.

But before I get to that, let us first try to understand why you may feel the urge to bundle them together, and let us enquire beyond the modest observation that both movies involve Mohanlal, a family in crisis, a crime and the treacherous hand of the law.

It's fair to say that Drishyam and Thudarum work on us in the same insidious fashion.

They are carefully constructed so that we start replaying their little moments in our heads as soon as their final frames have faded to black.

Once you have been released from their vice-like grips, you think back to a stare or a smile, to a seemingly harmless remark or an innocent question. (The civil contractor in Drishyam had no idea what he was getting into, did he?)

The significance of certain asides comes to you belatedly.

Only in retrospect do you grasp that a character's bizarre reactions were indicative of a larger narrative point. (In Thudarum, Binu Pappu serves up at least half a dozen such reactions.)

Yes, Drishyam and Thudarum are both plot-heavy contraptions.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the complete lack of visual sophistication in these movies is a big reason for their success. Give the audience something resembling a 'true crime' story, allow them the freedom to put two and two together, and who cares if your movie looks like a movie or one of them afternoon soaps?

Though such slapdashery may be expected of Jeethu Joseph, I doubt if admirers of Tharun Moorthy's first two films can ignore the anomaly on display here.

Fans of Operation Java and Saudi Vellakka would recall that the distinctive look of those movies (the mellow streetlights, the briny confessional sessions, the wash of spontaneous faces) was part of their feeling tone.

This time, however, Moorthy has concocted a movie in which his cinematographer and his production designer seem utterly dispensable in the face of the big twists, the dark reveals, and those 67 or so references that the story is stuffed with.

Even the manner in which certain shots are spliced together suggests that 'absence of imagination' can be overlooked so long as 'Mohanlal's plight' is effectively underscored. (There are very few Indian actors who enjoy the kind of goodwill that our dearest Lalettan does -- let's bow down to his 'stardom', and shed tears for the 'artist'!).

These similarities may be striking but where the two movies differ from each other is in the way each focuses your curiosity.

When you walk out of Drishyam, you walk out thinking about the character played by Mohanlal.

You wonder how the illiterate orphan came to be such a crafty fox, how he must have developed his circuitous mind and his resources of cunning, and all this through his love of cinema.

When you mull over the origins of such a character, it feels no more disagreeable than going on the trail of a raffish hero who lives by his wits.

On the other hand, when I walked out of Thudarum, I walked out thinking about its villain and intrigued about his backstory.

Yes, this is Inspector George's movie, it is Prakash Varma's movie.

Thanks to Varma's charismatic performance, we now know what a smiling adder looks like.

Here's one of the most conscienceless sadists to have ever graced the big screen, and he comes equipped with one of the most pleasant-sounding hellos.

Two days into watching Thudarum, I am still trying to visualise the map of George's police career: The precincts he must have poisoned by his very presence, the judicial killings presided over, the voices ruthlessly silenced.

Varma's performance generates so many ripples that when Tharun Moorthy gives us a scene of the policeman's retirement speech, we realise that the filmmaker has missed a trick or two by not cutting to the smirk-filled expressions of his old colleagues.

The sordid curiosity we feel for the villain of Thudarum is very different from the human curiosity we felt for the hero of Drishyam. And you have to be some sort of a cultural Pollyanna to not recognise that this shift points to a decline -- both in our approach to cinema and in our audience's tastes.

As arresting as the character is, Prakash Varma's George is yet another manifestation of a trend that has taken over our cinematic landscape.

This trend has it that the villain must be made ultra-cruel for his final comeuppance to feel valid. He's not villain enough if he shoots down innocents in a state of frenzy; he has to be far more calculating and primitive. That is to say, he has to slash, cut, behead or inflict terrible viciousness upon children.

And therein lies the crux of the decline.

For when your villains have to resort to this degree of violence to emphasise their evil, you are doing more than just desensitising your audience -- you are also reducing your heroes' range of meaning, you are making them less memorable.