Drishyam 3 Review: Vijay Salgaonkar's Tense Return

We pick up years after Vijay (Ajay Devgn) outsmarted everyone in sight. The Salgaonkars have settled into a cautious peace - Anju (Ishita Dutta) and Anu (Mrunal Jadhav) have grown up, Nandini (Shriya Saran) keeps the family running, and Vijay runs his cable business with one eye permanently over his shoulder. Then a fresh piece of evidence surfaces, and suddenly the investigation that everyone thought was dead is very much alive again.

Enter trouble with a badge: SP Rajiv Singh Tomar (Jaideep Ahlawat), a new cop with no personal history here - just cold, methodical instincts. Meanwhile, Meera Deshmukh (Tabu) has spent years stewing in grief and rage, and Mahesh (Rajat Kapoor) is back in her corner. Public Prosecutor Indrajith Shetty (Prakash Raj) sharpens his knives for round two. Vijay's old trick - the alibi, the movie theater, the tissue of small lies - won't cut it against an opponent who's studied the playbook. So he builds a new one. And it's elaborate.

Here's the thing about the Drishyam franchise: its real special effect is Ajay Devgn doing absolutely nothing dramatic while the world collapses around him. In Drishyam 3, he's at his most laconic - a dad who answers questions with questions and lies with the calm of a man ordering chai. It's a performance built on micro-expressions, and it's still the engine of the whole machine. Tabu, meanwhile, plays Meera as a wound that never closed. Every scene she shares with Devgn crackles, two great actors circling each other like chess grandmasters who hate each other's guts.

Abhishek Pathak directs with a steady hand. The film is 150 minutes, and you feel every one of them in the second half, but the first hour is genuinely tense - a slow burn that trusts the audience to remember the earlier films without spoon-feeding flashbacks every five minutes. The dialogues snap. The cinematography leans into coastal Goa's damp, shadowy mood, which suits a story about secrets that won't dry out.

The new addition, Jaideep Ahlawat, is a smart piece of casting. He doesn't try to out-Tabu Tabu; he plays Tomar as a bureaucrat with a scalpel where his heart should be. Watching him dismantle Vijay's old alibi piece by piece is the movie's best stretch.

Where it stumbles: the script occasionally mistakes convolution for cleverness. The final reveal, while satisfying on an emotional level, demands you not think about it too hard on the drive home. And the middle section drags - several scenes re-establish what we already know, as if the filmmakers weren't confident we'd stayed invested. We have. We're coming back for a third time. Relax.

Also worth noting: this is a Hindi-language Bollywood production, and it wears its mainstream DNA proudly - big emotions, bigger monologues, a climax designed for a packed house. Nothing wrong with that. But the tightness of the first film is missed.

Pros

• Ajay Devgn's minimalist, magnetic lead performance
• Tabu and Devgn's scenes together are electric
• Jaideep Ahlawat's cold, methodical new antagonist
• Tense, well-paced first half with genuine suspense

Cons

• 150-minute runtime with a saggy middle act
• The final twist requires generous suspension of disbelief
• Some repetitive re-establishing of prior events