Dridam, the Malayalam crime thriller directed by Martin Joseph and starring Shane Nigam, began streaming on JioHotstar on June 12, 2026. The film, which opened theatrically on May 8 and collected 3.76 crore net at the Indian box office, is now available in five languages: Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. International audiences, particularly the Malayali diaspora, can access the film through ManoramaMAX in territories outside India, excluding the Middle East and Africa.
Shane Nigam plays Vijay Radhakrishnan, a newly appointed Sub-Inspector posted to a remote police station in Idukki. His expectation of a quiet rural posting is upended when human remains are discovered on private property. The investigation pulls him into a web connecting a major bank robbery to a series of killings, and he has one week to solve the case before the trail goes cold. The premise sits in a genre that Malayalam cinema has made its own: the procedural thriller set in Kerala’s hill districts, where the landscape itself becomes a character and the isolation of the setting amplifies the tension.
The supporting cast includes Shobi Thilakan, Dinesh Prabhakar, Krishna Prabha and Saniya Fathima. Shobi Thilakan, the son of the late Thilakan, one of Malayalam cinema’s most revered character actors, has built a career in roles that trade on the same intensity his father brought to the screen. Krishna Prabha, a veteran of both television and film, adds the kind of lived-in familiarity that Malayalam audiences expect from their ensemble casts. The screenplay was written by Jomon John and Linto Devasia.
Martin Joseph directed the film as his debut feature. The production carries the banner of E4 Experiments, produced by Mukesh R. Mehta and C.V. Sarathi, and is presented by Bedtime Stories, the production label associated with Jeethu Joseph. Jeethu Joseph’s involvement as presenter carries weight in the Malayalam industry: his Drishyam (2013) became one of the most successful Indian thrillers of the decade, spawning remakes in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada, and its sequel Drishyam 2 (2021) repeated the pattern. His association with Dridam signals a mentorship dynamic, with a filmmaker known for tight plotting and procedural rigour lending his name to a debut director working in a similar register.
Shane Nigam’s career has followed a trajectory unusual for a young Malayalam actor. He debuted in Kismath (2016) and gained attention with Kumbalangi Nights (2019), a film that became a critical and commercial landmark for a new generation of Malayalam cinema. His subsequent work has included Eeda (2018), Ishq (2019) and Ullasam (2022), films that positioned him as an actor drawn to roles with emotional complexity and moral ambiguity. He has also faced public controversies, including disputes with production houses that led to temporary industry blacklisting, a period that he emerged from with his reputation as a performer intact but his public image complicated.
The film’s theatrical run of 3.76 crore is modest by the standards of Malayalam cinema’s bigger releases, but it falls within the range that makes a mid-budget thriller viable. Malayalam cinema operates on a different economic scale than Hindi or Telugu cinema: production budgets are lower, break-even points are more achievable, and the OTT window has become a crucial second revenue stream that can turn a modest theatrical performer into a profitable project overall. JioHotstar’s acquisition of Dridam in five languages reflects the platform’s strategy of using Malayalam content as a gateway to South Indian audiences who consume dubbed versions across language markets.
The Idukki setting places Dridam in a lineage of Malayalam thrillers that use Kerala’s hill stations as natural thriller environments. The district’s terrain, dense forests, tea plantations and remote settlements, provides the kind of geographic isolation that procedural thrillers need: a world where help is far away, communication is unreliable and the investigator is essentially alone with the crime. Films like Drishyam, Anjaam Pathiraa (2020) and Joseph (2018) have used similar settings to create atmospheric tension that the genre’s urban counterparts cannot replicate.
The IMDb rating of 7.3 from over 1,200 voters suggests that audiences who found the film have responded positively, even if the theatrical footprint was limited. Malayalam cinema’s relationship with its audience has always been mediated by word-of-mouth more than opening-weekend spectacle, and the OTT release on JioHotstar gives Dridam access to a viewer base that the theatrical run could not reach. The five-language availability means that the film can find audiences among Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi viewers who have developed an appetite for Malayalam thrillers through the streaming era.
The OTT release arrives in a week that also saw Suriya’s Karuppu land on Amazon Prime Video after its 300 crore theatrical run, a contrast that illustrates the range of Indian cinema’s OTT ecosystem. Where Karuppu arrives on streaming as a blockbuster taking a victory lap, Dridam represents the other end of the spectrum: a film that needs the streaming window to complete its commercial journey and find the audience that eluded it in theaters. Both models are viable, and both depend on the same infrastructure of multilingual dubbing and pan-Indian platform distribution that has transformed how Indian films are consumed.
Dridam is now streaming on JioHotstar in India and on ManoramaMAX internationally. Martin Joseph’s debut signals a filmmaker with a command of genre mechanics, and Jeethu Joseph’s mentorship gives the project a pedigree that will draw viewers who trust the Drishyam filmmaker’s judgement about what constitutes a well-constructed thriller. For Shane Nigam, it is another entry in a filmography that has consistently favoured substance over stardom, and another demonstration that Malayalam cinema’s pipeline of young talent continues to produce actors who can carry a film on intensity alone.
