Drishyam 3 Movie Review: The franchise explores guilt, but lacks suspense

Story: Life moves on in Georgekutty’s world. He is now a successful film producer, the children have grown up, and everything appears peaceful. But beneath the calm, does the past still haunt them?Review: The power of the Drishyam franchise was never merely its suspense. It was the uncomfortable moral space it placed the audience in. A man commits a crime, manipulates the system, destroys evidence, and escapes punishment, yet society collectively decides to stand with him because the crime was committed to protect his family.That emotional manipulation of morality remains the core strength of the franchise, and perhaps its biggest social question.In the third installment, Georgekutty is no longer the vulnerable cable TV operator audiences once sympathised with. He is now a successful film producer whose life outwardly reflects achievement and stability. His daughters are adults, the family has evolved, and the world around them appears to have moved on. But the film revisits the same haunting question: can fear ever leave a man who built his life on buried violence and hidden truth?Jeethu Joseph attempts to explore guilt, paranoia, and psychological exhaustion more than suspense this time. The focus is not entirely on investigation or survival, but on how violence silently continues to exist inside relationships, memory, and everyday life. Georgekutty’s greatest punishment is not prison, but the inability to live without fear.At the same time, the film also exposes and to an extent glorifies, how cinema and society romanticise antiheroes. Georgekutty is projected not as a criminal, but as a common man who transforms into a “superhero” through intelligence and survival instinct. That emotional packaging becomes socially problematic. Audience continue to justify violence, manipulation, and crime because they are committed in the name of family protection.In a society where several real-life crimes are often compared to the “Drishyam model,” the glorification becomes disturbing rather than merely cinematic. The franchise unintentionally normalises the idea that intelligence can morally outweigh crime, and that emotional intention can dilute accountability. Georgekutty exists in a morally grey space, but the films repeatedly frame him through sympathy, making the audience root for concealment rather than confrontation of truth. That is perhaps the most unsettling social impact of the franchise.The performances continue to remain one of the strongest aspects of the series. Mohanlal carries Georgekutty with restraint rather than theatricality, making the character feel painfully ordinary. The supporting characters also retain the emotional familiarity that has always made the family feel real to Malayali audiences. Technically too, the film stays polished, with Satheesh Kurup’s visuals and Anil Johnson’s score effectively sustaining the emotional mood.However, the film struggles with pacing. The narrative takes too long to establish its emotional conflict, and the suspense does not organically build for a significant portion of the runtime. The challenge is understandable. The audience already knows the crime, the family, and the emotional stakes. But in trying to create another layer over an already complete story, the screenplay occasionally feels stretched.The final portions still manage to deliver the tension and emotional payoff expected from the Drishyam brand. Yet the larger question remains unavoidable: was a third part truly necessary? The original film had closure within its moral ambiguity, while the second part expanded the psychological consequences effectively. This third chapter often feels like a continuation driven more by the weight of a successful franchise than by an urgent storytelling need.And as the film leaves space for yet another sequel, another question emerges — how long can one crime continue to generate new narratives before the emotional impact begins to dilute itself?Perhaps that is where Drishyam now stands: not merely as a thriller franchise, but as a reflection of how cinema repeatedly reopens violence, guilt, and morality because audiences themselves are unable to let go of Georgekutty.- Anjana George