Drishyam vs The Devotion of Suspect X
Jeethu Joseph swapped bleak brilliance for emotional intelligence — and created a thriller India couldn’t stop remaking.
Every serious movie buff who loved Drishyam has heard the rumor: its plot echoes The Devotion of Suspect X. To my mind, the more interesting question is what Jeethu Joseph did with that inspiration.
The book, on which the movie was based, was written by Japanese author Keigo Higashino. It features Detective Galileo, a physicist‑sleuth who teaches at a fictional elite university in Tokyo and occasionally consults for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police when cases involve scientific puzzles or anything requiring deep analytical reasoning. Most importantly he can read people. He is to the Tokyo police force what Sherlock Holmes was to Scotland Yard.
Science‑history buffs will recognize that the sleuth’s name is a nod to theoretical physicist Hideki Yukawa, Japan’s first Nobel laureate in 1949. There is even a Chennai connection — there always is in most things I write — the creation of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences was inspired by the Yukawa Institute of Theoretical Physics in Japan. It’s a reminder of how ideas travel across borders long before films do.
Anyway, who is Detective Galileo up against in this particular case? Tetsuya Ishigami, a high‑school mathematics teacher, is the worthiest of adversaries. A veritable monk, he is moved to help his neighbor, who has accidentally killed her abusive ex‑husband—a newly released convict who was harassing her and her teen daughter. Ishigami gives them ironclad alibis so they can escape any further investigation by the police. Higashino sketches the neighbor lightly, but we sense her desperation; Ishigami fills in the rest with his devotion.
Ishigami, it turns out, is Galileo’s classmate from college. Back then, he was known as Ishigami the Buddha, destined for glory in mathematical research. His professors had said that Ishigami had the kind of first‑rate mind that comes along maybe once in a century—a Srinivasa Ramanujan‑like figure. His mind is wasted; it is wasted in obscurity. The man is also physically strong and practices martial arts at the dojo, a detail that underscores his discipline rather than his aggression.
In Drishyam, the protagonist George Kutty is a self‑made man, an orphan who has not even had a chance to complete primary school. As the owner of a small cable‑television business, he watches movies at work nearly all day. The movie buff has also picked up plenty of practical information from the films. Thanks to all this, and his street smarts, he manages to devise the perfect cover‑up for the inadvertent killing of a voyeuristic teen at the hands of his older daughter. George Kutty’s education is entirely cinematic; if that isn’t a tribute to Indian films, what is?
Unlike Detective Galileo, Ishigami never had time for art—perhaps he has never even been inside a cinema hall. Ishigami the Buddha had planned to devote his life to mathematics, but due to family circumstances, he could not complete his Ph.D. Now he is stuck teaching mathematics at a school where his students couldn’t care less about the subject. The school board wants every student to pass, and so he has to dumb everything down. There was no point in even teaching math at this low level, he thinks. Wasn’t it enough to let the students know “there was this incomprehensible thing out there called mathematics and leave it at that?”
Ishigami has no one in his life. The neighbor, a woman he had come to care about, turns out to be in love with someone else. Ishigami turns himself in so the woman can be free even of the suspicion of guilt. She and her daughter can have a shot at happiness. For a moment, you even feel Ishigami might be better off in jail—freed from that terrible job, alone with his pencil and paper, with time to return to the mathematics he loves deeply.But the neighbor’s teenaged daughter cannot get over the trauma of the murder. The mother too breaks down when she realizes what her benefactor has done and confesses to the police.
Higashino denies his characters even the small mercy of a perfect crime. In the end, the devotion of the mathematician comes to nothing. Both the prodigy and his neighbor go to jail. The book ends with a primal sob of the brilliant man who realizes he had turned into a murderer for nothing.
It is all over, finished. There is no scope for anything more. Nobody is saved.
It is a great novel, but if the writer‑director of Drishyam had stuck to that plot, all we would be left with is an “award‑padam,” as we folks in Madras used to call it back in the day when Doordarshan screened such movies on Sunday afternoons—slow‑moving films critics love but the rest of us would happily avoid. Instead, Jeethu Joseph has given us a Malayalam thriller where the hero and his family kill someone, do the cover‑up, escape legal punishment, and we still root for them. This moral alignment—rooting for the transgressor—is rare in Indian cinema, and Joseph pulls it off with astonishing confidence. The film was remade in four other Indian languages and was a hit in every one of them.
Now Drishyam has spawned an organic sequel. And this may just be the beginning of something, a character says in the movie. The writer says in an interview that he has even thought of the climax of Drishyam 3. But I am not that greedy. Like many others in Madras, I will be happy if Papanasam 2 gets made.
Enough ink has been spilled over Drishyam vs The Devotion of Suspect X. Higashino builds a perfect crime that destroys everyone it touches; Joseph builds a perfect cover‑up that saves the people who matter. One story treats genius as a curse. The other insists it can be a lifeline. That difference — not the plot — is the real leap of imagination.