Abhishek Pathak’s Drishyam The Conclusion Puts Him in Hindi Cinema’s Highest Order

Hindi cinema has a new generation of directors proving that mainstream filmmaking can be both ambitious and deeply audience-driven. With Drishyam The Conclusion, Abhishek Pathak has made it big and grand in that conversation. Earlier this year, Aditya Dhar had shown what scale and spectacle can do when backed by a strong directorial voice. In the past few years, Amar Kaushik has made genre cinema feel his own. Laxman Utekar, too, has built a recognisable film vocabulary with his rooted movies.

What makes Pathak’s rise spectacular is that he has done it through one of Hindi cinema’s trickiest genres – the thriller. Drishyam 2 established his command over the franchise; The Conclusion is where he has taken ownership of it. The film is credited to Pathak as its director and co-writer, and its Hindi story moves substantially away from the Malayalam third instalment. It is a considerable creative gamble that has paid off. Drishyam comes with an audience that doesn’t merely watch the films but even studies them. Every clue is dissected, every theory debated, every twist anticipated. Pathak’s answer has been to make the audience work harder. The reviews have repeatedly singled out the screenplay’s ability to keep viewers guessing, while the film’s writing and direction have emerged as its major talking points.

More importantly, Pathak has managed something that is difficult even for established filmmakers – he has made a franchise film feel like a filmmaker’s film. The world remains recognisable, but the storytelling is not content with simply repeating what worked before. And the audience has responded on a scale that makes the evolution impossible to ignore. The Conclusion opened to an estimated 64.5 crore in India on Day 1, according to live trade figures, more than four times the 15.38 crore opening of the film’s last part.

Pathak has ditched safety net of a formula. He has taken a remake, built a Hindi franchise around it and then, at its most important juncture, made the story his own. His success and the rave reviews is sign of a filmmaker announcing that he has arrived and here to surprise us!