Drishyam 2
Synopsis:
Akshaye Khanna is staring intensely at a plastic scale model of a police station while chewing on a toothpick like he's auditioning for a gritty nineteen-nineties crime thriller that everyone forgot about. God, his hair is so stiff. Anyway, we are talking about Drishyam 2, which is easily one of the wildest sequels to come out of bollywood in recent memory. Ajay Devgn is back as Vijay Salgaonkar, and he's still running his little cable office while sneaking off to watch terrible B-movies and writing scripts that nobody wants to buy. It has been seven years since Sam Deshmukh went missing, and honestly, the local townspeople won't stop gossiping about it. Every single person in this Goan village has an opinion on whether Vijay fed that kid to the pigs or buried him under the new foundations of the police station. Shriya Saran plays Nandini, his terrified wife, who drops kitchen plates every five minutes because she's having anxiety attacks over the sheer stress of covering up a murder. Ishita Dutta is back too as Anju, the daughter who actually swung the shovel that fateful night, and she's still jumping at every sudden noise. The trauma is real. It's heavy. And it's all captured in the typical hyper-dramatic style you expect from modern hindi movies, though this one actually keeps you guessing.
And then boom, Tarun Ahlawat walks into the story as the new top cop who refuses to let sleeping dogs lie. He's got this smug little smirk and a habit of tapping his pen that makes you want to throw a stale samosa at the screen. Honestly, Tarun is obsessed with finding Sam’s bones because he wants to prove he's smarter than IG Meera Deshmukh, played by Tabu. Tabu is back in her sharp blazer, looking like she hasn't slept a wink since part one, and she's still weeping into her tea while plotting revenge against Vijay. The rivalry between her and Akshaye's character is palpable, but mostly they just stand in brightly lit government offices pointing at maps and shouting about jurisdiction. Stuff happens so fast. Like, Vijay builds a giant new house right next to the police station just to flex on everyone, which is the most chaotic villain move ever, even if he's technically our protagonist. He also buys a movie production house and starts hanging out with a local screenwriter named Murugan just so he can secretly buy the rights to a murder mystery book that mirrors his exact crime. It's totally meta. You're sitting there watching a bollywood movie about a guy making a movie based on a cover-up he actually pulled off in real life. My brain melted a little bit trying to track the layers. You just have to roll with it.
Right when things get super tense and Akshaye Khanna is about to kick down Vijay's front door with a search warrant, the movie abruptly forces us to sit through a completely random, incredibly upbeat musical number about family road trips that nobody asked for. Seriously, why do hindi films always ruin the pacing with these upbeat tracks? You're staring at the screen wondering if Anju is about to confess, and suddenly Ajay Devgn is dancing on a beach with sunglasses on. It's hilarious. But then we hit the interval point. The exact moment the screen goes black for intermission, Tarun finds a suspicious skull buried under the old police station floorboards and laughs maniacally. We all grabbed our popcorn and debated whether the writers actually sold out and let the cops win. Act two kicks off with a massive media circus outside the Salgaonkar house. Reporters are shoving microphones in Nandini's face, yelling ugly things, and the local butcher is throwing rocks at the porch. Vijay has to navigate this public nightmare while quietly orchestrating an elaborate chess match against the entire state police force. He visits the local jail, bribes an old watchman, switches out medical records, and pays off a bunch of shady extras just to plant false memories in everybody's heads. The choreography of these frame-jobs is honestly impressive. He's like a mastermind who read too many crime novels. Every single person in town repeats the exact alibi Vijay scripted for them on October third and fourth. The police are going crazy because they have zero physical evidence that matches the timeline anymore. Tabu is pacing around her office, smoking cigarettes and looking ready to murder someone herself. Akshaye Khanna starts slamming his fists on tables during interrogation scenes, shouting dialogue about how a clever man always leaves a trail even when he thinks he wiped it clean.
And then the courtroom sequence hits you like a freight train. Or wait, it's not even a traditional courtroom, it's a magistrate's hearing where everyone is sweating under giant ceiling fans that squeak every time they rotate. Look, I spent way too much time staring at this one background extra sitting behind the prosecutor—he had a terrible green sweater with a moth hole right near the collar and he kept blinking at the camera like he was being held hostage. Anyway, the DNA test results from the skull finally arrive in a sealed manila envelope, and they prove the bones actually belong to a completely different missing person, completely ruining the prosecution's entire case in one single, rushed sentence. Vijay didn't even bury Sam under the police station. He buried an orphan's remains that he stole from a medical college years ago, and he dropped Sam's actual body into the wet concrete of the brand new police station foundation while it was being poured right under the cops' noses. The realization washes over Tabu's face in slow motion. She looks defeated, realizing she will never legally prove what happened to her son because the evidence has literally been turned into a load-bearing pillar of the local constabulary. The judge dismisses all charges due to a lack of credible DNA evidence linking the Salgaonkars to the crime. Vijay walks out of the courthouse steps past a wall of screaming journalists who shove cameras in his face. He doesn't smile. He doesn't gloat. He just fixes the collar of his shirt, steps into his white SUV, and drives away into the dusty Goan sunset.
Akshaye Khanna adjusts his glasses with a twitch that I swear I’ve seen my high school chemistry teacher do whenever a titration went sideways, and honestly that tiny bit of business tells you more about Tarun Ahlawat than any page of exposition ever could. Sequel math usually ruins everything because the first trick was already exposed, but Drishyam 2 pulls off the rare sleight-of-hand where the repetition of the formula is precisely the trap. You go in looking for the buried body all over again, forgetting that the ground itself has shifted while you were busy checking the date on a movie ticket. It helps that Abhishek Pathak isn't trying to out-direct Jeethu Joseph from the original Malayalam version scene for scene, choosing instead to lean into the glossy, slightly heavy-handed visual grammar of modern Hindi films where every shadow looks like it was painted by a guy with a very expensive lighting rig.
Vijay Salgaonkar is still running his cable business and still sneaking off to watch low-budget thrillers, but the jaunty optimism of a man who got away with murder has curdled into a permanent, exhausted vigilance. Ajay Devgn plays this with his chin tucked down so low you can barely see his eyes, using that massive, broad frame not to project strength but to shrink away from every casual glance on the street. It’s a performance built entirely out of micro-moments, like the way his thumb rubs the edge of a tea glass or how he pauses for a fraction of a second too long before answering a polite question from the neighborhood grocer. He doesn't give you any grand, theatrical speeches about guilt or remorse, which makes the few times he actually raises his voice feel like a shotgun blast in a library. Tabu, returning as the broken police chief Meera Deshmukh, matches him beat for beat without chewing the scenery off the walls, though there’s a moment during a confrontation in a damp parking lot where her wig looks just a little too stiff for the humidity.
The script keeps the narrative engine humming by making the police look less like incompetent buffoons this time around and more like bureaucratic sharks smelling old blood in the water. Akshaye Khanna brings a coiled, jittery energy to the proceedings that reminds me a lot of his turn in Section 375, that same clipped diction and predatory stillness that makes you want to check your pockets for stolen keys. He doesn't shout or bang his fists on the interrogation table; he just leans in close and lets his expensive fountain pen click against the desk until your nerves fray. The supporting players, including Shriya Saran as a mother carrying a fracture she can never quite patch up and Ishita Dutta as the daughter whose panic attacks punctuate the household routine like a faulty metronome, carry the emotional collateral damage without turning the family dinner scenes into melodrama.
The cinematography by Satish Surya loves a good top-down shot, flattening the crowded Goa alleys into intricate circuit boards where every pedestrian is a potential witness and every corner store holds a camera. It’s effective, even if the color grading leans so heavily into teal and mustard that you sometimes feel like you’re watching the movie through a pair of cheap sunglasses found at a gas station. Devi Sri Prasad’s background score hits the recurring theme song just a few times too many during the middle stretch, hammering home the suspense when the actors’ faces are already doing all the heavy lifting.
What keeps this thing from collapsing under the weight of its own cleverness is how it treats the local gossip mill as a character in its own right. Bollywood movies usually treat small towns as either romantic idylls or backward hellscapes, but here the neighborhood is a panopticon of aunties who notice a change in brand of cooking oil and school kids who repeat rumors heard through the thin walls of a generator shed. The screenplay understands that a lie isn't just something you tell an inspector; it's something you have to live inside every time you buy milk or wave to the postman.
There is a specific kind of satisfaction in watching a narrative structure that refuses to cheat, even when it’s juggling half a dozen timelines and a dozen contradictory statements. You can see the twists coming if you pay attention to the background extras, which is how a fair mystery should always operate. When the final confession drops, it doesn't arrive with a thunderclap or a sweeping orchestral swell, just a quiet admission in a sterile room that leaves everyone involved a little smaller than they were before.