Ajay Devgn’s Drishyam 3 is a potent parable about how propaganda works | Opinion-entertainment News

The only real silver lining in the franchise, from the beginning, has been its engagement with the idea of truth, or, more specifically, with the manufacture of truth. Vijay, armed with his cinephilic imagination, takes the two most fundamental instruments of cinema: the visual image and the spoken word, and uses them to construct, normalise and, eventually, make believable a truth that never existed in the first place.

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Take, for instance, the second half of the 2015 thriller Drishyam. To save himself, Vijay does two things. First, he narrativises a lie by making his family live it. So, by inhabiting this fiction together, they not only create a visual record of the life they claim to have lived; the lie is also rehearsed until it no longer feels like one. And then comes the more ingenious part: they allow this manufactured truth to seep into their everyday lives, mentioning it in passing, casually, almost incidentally. They feed the fiction into the social bloodstream, where it returns to them as corroboration, ordinary people repeating it, almost like parrots, as though recalling a reality they had witnessed themselves. He takes it further in the sequel, writing a book that, like cinema, turns fiction into a record.

But the real leap comes in the third part, when he turns to WhatsApp to circulate yet another version of a reality that never existed. He understands that a lie becomes considerably harder to dislodge once it is no longer simply told but transmitted, forwarded and repeated by others. In doing so, he even instrumentalises a religion and its followers, appropriating their collective identity to lend credibility to his own fiction.

It is here that Drishyam begins to acquire a potent political resonance. The franchise becomes, perhaps inadvertently, an allegory for the mechanics of propaganda. What makes this particularly interesting is the subversion at its very centre. Vijay is not a man of power; he is an ordinary, uneducated middle-class citizen. But in manufacturing his version of reality, he is employing precisely the methods historically perfected by those who wield power: exploiting institutional gaps, manufacturing consensus, and making repetition do the work of truth.

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The irony of Drishyam is that its protagonist defeats the system by learning to speak the language of power. And it is cinema, with its power to make us see, and therefore believe, that becomes both the metaphor and the mechanism of this transformation. There is something almost uncannily fitting about Drishyam 3 arriving in 2026, at a moment when Hindi cinema is increasingly less interested in telling stories than in manufacturing truths. Half-baked histories presented as fact, bigotry recast as conviction, hatred given the polish of entertainment. Vijay’s cinephilia, then, is hardly incidental. He has learnt his grammar of deception from the very medium that taught him how images, told not necessarily realistically but convincingly, can begin to pass for reality. In both cases, however, there is only one audience left to fool: us.