Pan-India before pan-India: Malayalam cinema comes full circle with Drishyam 3

Long before the term “pan-India cinema” became everyone's favourite buzzword, Malayalam cinema was already doing it. Quietly. Organically. For decades. Without ever announcing it from the rooftops. There were no carefully strategised multilingual release plans. No promotional campaigns repeatedly reminding audiences that a film was made for all of India. No desperate attempts to garner universal appeal through scale and spectacle – be it in the '90s or just a few years ago. Read Full Story Malayalam cinema simply focused on telling good stories, and somehow, those stories travelled farther than anyone imagined. That journey perhaps comes full circle with Mohanlal and director Jeethu Joseph's Drishyam 3. Today, the phrase “pan-India film” immediately brings to mind giant action spectacles mounted on massive budgets, stars delivering punch-dialogues in slow motion, films simultaneously dubbed into five languages, and cross-industry collaborations of actors and technicians. But Malayalam cinema is built differently. It never chased attention. It just concentrated on rooted emotions that naturally appeal to the larger masses. And that difference matters. Because even now, when industries consciously attempt to manufacture pan-India appeal with flashy budgets and manufactured stories, Malayalam cinema continues doing what it has always done best: making stories deeply rooted in local culture that somehow end up feeling universal. Though recent years have seen some Malayalam films consciously engineered for pan-India appeal, a larger section of the industry still believes in one reality: emotion and writing matter more than scale. Before pan-India was even a business model In many ways, Malayalam cinema understood something that Indian cinema is still trying to learn. Audiences do not connect with films because they are designed to travel, but because the emotions inside them feel honest. It is these emotions that do the talking, not the scale or the spectacle orchestrated on screen. There have been several examples that stand as a testament to this. Take Shobana, Suresh Gopi, and Mohanlal's Manichitrathazhu as the foundational blueprint. When director Fazil made the psychological thriller in 1993, nobody marketed it as a crossover phenomenon. It was an intensely Malayali film rooted in Kerala’s social fabric, traditions, architecture, and family structures. The humour was local, the emotional rhythms were local, and even its understanding of mental health came from a distinctly Indian cultural lens. And yet, the story refused to remain confined to one language. Over the next decade, Manichitrathazhu was remade into Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi. It took over ten years, but even then, the story never aged. The Tamil version, Chandramukhi starring Rajinikanth, Jyotika, and Prabhu, became one of Tamil cinema’s biggest blockbusters, while the Hindi adaptation, Bhool Bhulaiyaa starring Vidya Balan and Akshay Kumar, became iconic enough to launch an entire franchise of its own. Nobody sat in a boardroom discussing the strategy for potential remakes or pan-India attention. The story simply travelled because it was too compelling to stay in one language. That became Malayalam cinema’s defining strength: storytelling with universally recognisable emotions, sometimes hyperlocal and sometimes entirely universal. Drishyam and the birth of the modern pan-India thriller Then came Drishyam in 2013, and even today, it remains fascinating how small the film actually is on paper. It features a cable TV operator, a middle-class family man, an accidental murder, and a cover-up. There are no superheroes here, no mythological scale, and no extravagant world-building. Just a middle-class family navigating their way through an accidental crime. All emotion and no big staging. I still remember my college days in the early 2010s when my professor picked Drishyam for a film studies class. A dimly-lit room, Mohanlal in all his glory, and Jeethu Joseph's twist-laden story. When Mohanlal's Georgekutty looks at the camera after burying the body of a young Varun Prabhakar—whom his daughter had accidentally killed—all of our jaws collectively dropped. Up until then, a thriller revolving around a middle-class family had never appealed to a wider audience quite the way Drishyam did. And that is one of the primary reasons why Drishyam became one of the most remade Indian films in modern history. Director Jeethu Joseph did not create Georgekutty as a typical mass hero; Mohanlal played him like an ordinary man surviving through intelligence, fear, and instinct. The film’s brilliance came from how emotionally accessible it was. Strip away the thriller mechanics, and Drishyam is fundamentally about one terrifying question: how far would a parent go to protect their child? Every part of the country understood that fear, which is why the film worked all across India. Tamil cinema remade it with Kamal Haasan, Telugu cinema adapted it with Venkatesh D