Sequels, by their very nature, are a redundant breed. They are made not because they must, but because they are the need of the hour.  The Drishyam sequel (available on Amazon Prime) spends more than an hour of its 3.5 hours playing-time telling us nothing about Georgekutty and his family that we don’t already know (we’ve seen Mohanlal, Kamal Haasan and Ajay Devgan playing Georgekutty) except that they love one another, that the mother is strictly conservative with their two daughters while the father is winkingly liberal with them. That, that they banter among themselves about Georgekutty’s ambitions to turn a film producer.

All this makes for a  good diversion for those familiar with the characters, though it says nothing new, nothing here warrants a revisit into this wholesome family with a dark secret (hint: burial in a most unlikely place). When the heat kicks in and the plot propels ahead like a drunken monk, the incidents in the second-half feel like the plot being stretched just to stay relevant. There are two sets of infiltrators here trying to excavate the dark secret from Georgekutty’s family.  The conspiratorial thrust never quite makes the inroads into the narrative that sequel aficionados had hoped for.

New characters like a battling couple Saritha (Anjali Nair) and  Sabu (Sumesh Chandran)  who move next door to Georgekutty’s, bring no charm or intrigue to the proceedings. They are just devices to breathe life into a  plot that was dead and buried six years ago.