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Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar (2026) · ⭐⭐½ (2.5/5)

Dir. Shahad Nilambur · Starring Parvathy Thiruvothu, Mathew Thomas, Sidharth Bharathan, Vijayaraghavan, Unnimaya Prasad, Vinay Forrt · 158 min · Malayalam

Streaming: Netflix

*

The setup: Aleena Abraham (Parvathy Thiruvothu) joins the Kerala Police after her husband is martyred in a sting operation, leaving her to raise a toddler — and leaving her with one fear she cannot put down: that her daughter will one day know the same loneliness she did as a child. On night patrol, a car dodges a checkpoint and turns into a scuffle over car keys. The suspect, a store manager named Jayaprakash, ends up dead from a service revolver. Then they open the boot and find the body of his accomplice, Meera. The officers bury both, and agree to say nothing. Days later, DySP Harris Meeran (Vijayaraghavan) of the Crime Branch arrives to investigate a separate killing tied to the same pair — and he starts noticing things a cover-up cannot hide.

The verdict: an OK watch, and it never once stops being a Drishyam wannabe.

Let me get the comparison out of the way, because it is the whole conversation. A death in a moment of panic. A body that has to disappear. A group agreeing on one story and rehearsing it. A gifted investigator who reads the lie inside the details — here, a fabricated voice note betrayed by a prayer recited only in the mornings, on a message supposedly recorded at night. Loopholes anticipated well in advance. A courtroom turn that hinges on forensic procedure. A closing reveal that the one piece of evidence everyone hunted was hidden in plain sight the entire time. That is Drishyam's chassis, and this film does not so much borrow it as rebuild it with swapped parts. If you have seen the original, you are never more than a scene away from recognising the blueprint.

The one genuinely fresh idea is who is doing the covering up. Instead of a family shielding itself, it is a police station shielding itself — the people sworn to solve the crime are the ones who committed it, burying the evidence in their own backyard and telling a colleague that the mound was a cat. There is real unease in that inversion, and the film's best passages come from watching a small group calcify into a conspiracy, with each of them privately terrified of the others.

Parvathy Thiruvothu is the reason to watch. She plays Aleena as watchful rather than righteous — a woman constantly running the next three moves in her head — and she holds the film's centre without ever pushing for sympathy. It is a controlled performance in a film that does not always deserve it. Vijayaraghavan gives Harris Meeran genuine gravity as the investigator, and the device of Aleena treating Harris's own book on criminal investigation as her operating manual is the screenplay's smartest flourish: the hunter's published methods become the prey's defence.

The problem is everything holding those two up. At 158 minutes the film is far longer than its plot needs, and the middle stretch sags badly — once the cover-up is set and the net is closing, there is a long plateau where the film explains itself rather than escalates. Every officer gets a personal subplot: Sreenath's caste-crossed romance, Dasan's search for a bride, Divya's struggle to conceive. None of it is uninteresting on its own, but none of it deepens the crime story, and together it dilutes the tension exactly when the film should be tightening. Whole passages of Harris's book are read aloud as narration, which is a crutch the film leans on every time it cannot dramatize a deduction. And while Shahad Nilambur frames it cleanly, the direction rarely generates dread — scenes that should feel like a clock ticking instead simply play out. Compare the original, where the entire pleasure was watching ordinary people barely contain their terror, and here the officers mostly look mildly inconvenienced.

Worth being fair about the reception, because it has been warm. The film has crossed roughly ₹50 crore worldwide, IMDb sits around 7.7, and critics were mixed-to-positive. But the Drishyam comparison is not a niche complaint — it is the first thing audiences mention, with viewers openly calling it a rehash. So this is not me holding a grudge against a film everyone else loved; the resemblance is the popular read too.

Bottom line: Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar is an OK watch. Parvathy Thiruvothu is excellent, the inversion of police-as-suspects is a good idea, and the courtroom finish has a genuine kick — but the screenplay lags through its middle hour, the subplots pad rather than deepen, and the direction never builds the pressure this story needs. It is Drishyam with a uniform on, and it does not improve on the original. Watch it for Parvathy, and go in knowing you have seen this structure before.