Nishikant Kamat

Drishyam (2015) spends time on how a family builds an alibi while the police press for answers. Kamat takes the planning seriously enough for us to follow it, making the practical details central to the suspense. We were uncomfortable at how much we wanted the cover-up to hold, because each piece of preparation gave us another reason to hope the family would succeed. Ajay Devgn and Tabu keep the film tense even when the plotting slows. It is a good thriller, with a pacing problem that matters.

That concern with people pushed too far runs through a career that moved between Marathi, Tamil and Hindi films. His Marathi debut, Dombivali Fast (2005), follows a middle-class man frustrated by Mumbai life; he remade it in Tamil as Evano Oruvan (2007). His Hindi debut, Mumbai Meri Jaan (2008), uses interlinked stories responding to the 2006 Mumbai train bombings. He worked with John Abraham on Force (2011), and with Irrfan Khan on the vigilante drama Madaari (2016).

Remakes, including Force and Drishyam, became a recurring part of his Hindi work. We would not dismiss the results merely because the stories had been told before. Kamat’s work with Devgn in Drishyam keeps the star grounded in everyday realism, which helps make the family’s predicament credible. Without that credibility, the alibi-building would be an elaborate exercise we had little reason to care about.

The difficulty is knowing when we have understood enough. Editor Aarif Sheikh lets Drishyam’s alibi-building register clearly, yet the 163-minute running time leaves stretches in which preparation feels like delay. The music credited to Sameer Phaterpekar and Vishal Bhardwaj adds tension where the mechanics are already doing the work. Kamat does not always trust how closely we are following him. Start with Drishyam, provided a family thriller with some unnecessary waiting still sounds like a good evening.