Tabu

In the interrogation scenes of Drishyam (2015), a carefully prepared account has to survive Tabu asking questions. She plays IG Meera Deshmukh with enough determination to make us doubt how safely Ajay Devgn’s Vijay can rely on his ingenuity. That pressure is essential to a thriller which spends so much time on the cover-up. We felt uneasy about wanting Vijay to get away with it, because her questioning made our allegiance harder to excuse. She gives us a reason to worry whenever the plotting threatens to make him too secure.

Her early commercial work gave way to more selective choices from the mid-1990s, across independent and mainstream films. Chandni Bar (2001) put a woman in difficult circumstances at the centre; Maqbool (2003) offered another departure from the conventional heroine. Vishal Bhardwaj, her director on Maqbool and Haider (2014), has been an important collaborator in that work. Both films are Shakespeare adaptations, with roles that suit her restrained intensity. The later thrillers Drishyam and Andhadhun (2018) sit alongside continued work in more broadly commercial films.

In Drishyam, there are limits to what that conviction can achieve. The writing sometimes makes its points about justice and corruption too simply, leaving the actors with less to work through than the premise promises. Tabu keeps the police a serious obstacle, but the film’s length remains a problem even when the central contest holds our attention. Her scenes with Devgn make it worth the patience; they do not make a brisk police procedural out of it.

She is also good for Devgn, whose character’s resourcefulness needs a credible opponent if we are to admire it. That is useful acting in a tightly plotted thriller, where it would be easy to turn everyone around the protagonist into a fool. Tabu keeps the questions difficult enough for the answers to matter. Choose Drishyam for an evening when following a slowly tested alibi sounds like pleasure rather than homework.