I came across a line recently — just a casual post online — and I haven't been able to shake it since. It said: "Georgekutty has become an underrated character just because he is played by Sri Mohanlal."
I read it. Scrolled past. Came back. Read it again. And then I sat with it for a long time, because I think it is one of the great observations anyone has made about the Drishyam franchise.
Here I am, still thinking about it.
We have spent over a decade watching this man — this cable TV operator from a small village, fourth-grade dropout, devoted husband, fiercely loving father — and we have cheered for him. Every. Single. Time. We rooted for him in 2013. We stood up for him in 2021. And now, in 2026, with Drishyam 3 fresh in our hearts, we are doing it all over again.
But here is the question I want to sit with today: Who exactly are we cheering for?
Let me describe Georgekutty to you — not as the hero the story frames him as, but as who he actually is.
He is a man with no formal education beyond the fourth grade who, over the course of three films, orchestrates one of the most elaborate and sustained cover-ups in cinematic history. He conceals a death. He manipulates an entire community. He plants a false alibi across a four-day period so meticulously that the police — senior officers, trained investigators — cannot crack it. He moves a body buried in a police station compound. He exhumes a corpse from a cemetery, swaps it with the remains of the boy his daughter accidentally killed, and then dissolves those original bones entirely using acid.
Read that sentence again, slowly.
And in Drishyam 3, the shadows return — and so does he, with the same calm, the same calculation, the same willingness to go as far as it takes.
What makes Georgekutty genuinely extraordinary — and genuinely frightening — is his source material. He has no legal training, no criminal connections, no insider knowledge of forensics. What he has is an obsessive, lifelong love of cinema.
Every crucial decision he makes — every misdirection, every alibi construction, every step of evidence disposal — is borrowed from films he has watched. He is the rare person who did not just consume stories but filed them away, treating every thriller he ever watched as a masterclass in how the world works. When the crisis came, he did not panic. He scrolled through his mental library and picked the right film for the occasion.
There is something almost poetic about that. And something deeply unsettling. Because it means his brilliance was never improvised. It was prepared. He was always, on some level, ready.
A common man is forced into an impossible situation when his family accidentally causes the death of a boy. What follows is not a breakdown — it is a masterplan. He engineers a four-day alibi, rallies his community without their knowing, and stays two steps ahead of an Inspector General of Police. He wins. Completely.
Years have passed. New evidence surfaces. A more dangerous investigation begins. Georgekutty does not merely defend — he counters. He plays a psychological game so layered that by the end, you are not entirely sure how many moves ahead he was playing from the very beginning. He moves the body. He burns what remains. He wins again.
He is now a film producer — fitting, perhaps, for a man who learned everything from films. But the past has a long reach. This chapter is less about outsmarting and more about enduring. The paranoia beneath his calm surface finally becomes visible. The cost of what he has done begins to show on his face, in his family, in the life he has built over buried secrets. Yet the calculation remains. The man has not changed. Only the terrain has.
Here is where it gets complicated — where I have to be honest with myself as a viewer.
Every terrible thing Georgekutty does, he does for his family. His wife. His daughters. That is the emotional engine of the entire franchise, and it is enormously effective, because it taps into something primal. We understand a parent who would do anything. We feel it.
But "anything" in this case includes concealing a death, manipulating witnesses, moving bodies, dissolving human remains in acid, and carrying that secret for over a decade — all while watching his family live on top of it.
He is the ultimate family man. He is also the reason his family can never truly be free.
And now we arrive at the heart of that line I cannot stop thinking about.
Georgekutty is underrated — not because he is overlooked, but because he is misread. We do not see him clearly, because Mohanlal does not let us. Not through dishonesty, but through sheer, overwhelming warmth. There is something in Mohanlal's eyes, in the way he holds a scene, that communicates decency even when the character is doing indecent things. He makes you feel safe. He makes you trust Georgekutty the way Georgekutty's village does — intuitively, completely, without asking too many questions.
The greatest trick Georgekutty ever pulled was not on the police. It was on us.
If this character had been played by someone we did not love, someone whose face we did not associate with goodness, we would have read the story differently. We would have seen a calculating, cold man who buried a body and slept soundly. We would have asked harder questions.
But because it is Mohanlal — because it is Lalettan — we found justifications. We told ourselves it was an accident. We told ourselves he had no choice. We told ourselves that what he did was love.
All of those things are partly true. None of them is the whole truth.
Georgekutty is one of the most brilliantly written and brilliantly performed characters in Indian cinema. He is also, without question, a criminal — a shrewd, premeditated, unrepentant one. He is neither villain nor hero. He is something far more dangerous — he is human. And that is entirely Jeethu Joseph's brilliant, brilliant doing.
The line is true. Georgekutty is underrated precisely because its Mohanlal. Because here, Mohanlal does something — he makes you trust a man you should not trust, love a man you should question, and root for a man whose hands are far from clean. He does not play the character. He protects him — the same way Georgekutty protects his family. Completely. Unconditionally.
Comments
Post a Comment