Even before the release of the movie, after Drishyam was first made and released in Malayalam there had been allegations on director Jeetu Joseph on tampering with the content of a popular Korean Novel titled ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’. But the director refuted the rumours and after the film’s stupendous success at the box-office, the producers even sold the remake rights for other South Film Industries. Kannada and Telugu remakes of the film proved successful and the Tamil remake is set to start in August.
Once again the issue that the original story idea and some scenes are truly inspired from ‘Suspect X’, has surfaced. The rights to adapt the story to make a Bollywood film have been acquired by Ekta Kapoor of Balaji Telefilms. ‘Kahani’ fame director Sujoy Ghosh has been roped in to direct it. Reportedly Vidya Balan may play the female lead for the Bollywood movie. Though director Jeetu Joseph says that his story is an original one and he hadn’t been inspired by any Korean novel, when one looks into the actual story of the novel, one can find striking similarities.
In the movie, the protagonists are a married couple and the husband tries to protect his wife and daughter from the mysterious murder trial. In the novel, the protagonists aren’t husband and wife but the male lead is a man who lives next door of a divorced single mother. There ends the difference and the rest remains almost the same. The male protagonist protecting the female lead and her daughter from the mysterious murder trail and an investigating team after them…many things common. One cannot in anway believe that it is a sheer coincidence that two stories have such striking similarities.
