Drishyam: The Conclusion has crossed Rs 300 crore worldwide in four days, with weekday business described as promising. But the final chapter of the thriller franchise is also leaving audiences with a set of forensic and procedural questions that the screenplay raises and then largely sets aside.
A forensic thread that fades
The story reopens its case on a striking discovery: soil from the under-construction police station shows Sameer Deshmukh’s DNA. That should be a major investigative break, but the film treats it more like a door that simply needs to be opened again.
If Sameer was never buried there, and the skeleton recovered from the site belonged to someone else, the DNA evidence deserved far more aggressive follow-up. Instead, it becomes a prompt for reopening the case and then drifts out of the courtroom argument.
The Pinto contradiction
Investigators eventually match the recovered skeleton to Christopher Pinto, a young man who died after a head injury. That identification is used to get permission to exhume a grave at St Andrew’s Cemetery. Once the grave is opened, the logic gets stranger.
The forensic finding that the police-station skeleton is Pinto should not collapse because a second skeleton appears in his coffin; there cannot be two skeletons with the same DNA. Yet the prosecution never presses that argument, and the newly found skeleton is not subjected to an immediate DNA test.
The film establishes Rajveer Singh Tomar, played by Jaideep Ahlawat, as a cop sharp enough to test soil. Still, he never finds a moment to test the prosthetic skeleton in the cemetery. It is a version of the familiar Titanic raft problem: the audience spots the possible solution, but the characters do not.
Convenience in court
The trial leans heavily on timing. Rajveer misses the hearing he worked to bring about because he is stuck in a high-level meeting, then walks out of that same meeting when the plot needs him elsewhere. Indrajeet Shetty, presented as an unbeaten lawyer, submits the voice recordings without authentication.
Rajveer later decodes within minutes that Vijay Salgaonkar’s voice was pre-recorded and that the family staged his homecoming on the night of July 23. The speed of that deduction makes the earlier failure to check the tape feel less like a character flaw and more like a screenplay shortcut.
- Sameer Deshmukh’s DNA in the police-station soil is barely investigated.
- The recovered skeleton is identified as Christopher Pinto, but the contradiction is left alone.
- Voice recordings are submitted without verification and decoded almost instantly later.
Why the franchise still holds
The film’s strongest turn belongs to Nandini Salgaonkar, who baits the prosecution into using the surveillance tapes. It is the kind of reversal that has defined the series: Vijay Salgaonkar, a family man who failed the fourth standard, protects his own by staying ahead of the law.
Directed by Abhishek Pathak, the film features Tabu, Rajat Kapoor, Ishita Dutta and Mrunal Jadhav, with Kamlesh Sawant returning as Laxmikant Gaitonde. The fact that the film has already crossed Rs 300 crore worldwide in four days suggests that, for a large part of the audience, the emotional payoff still outweighs the forensic gaps. That is the franchise’s real bet.
Source: India Today
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