Lion

Wow. I did not expect this. If you have haven’t seen Lion yet, you’re probably expecting what the marketing has thrown at you; a Nicole Kidman-starrer about a handsome but tortured Dev Patel with his supportive girlfriend Rooney Mara by his side. Yeah, that’s not quite all of it.

The first act of the film, over a half hour, is set entirely in India, introducing the heartbreaking story of how a little boy gets separated from his family. After some language barriers prevent him from getting back home, he lives on the streets avoiding shady characters, making his way to an orphanage and eventually being one of the lucky few that gets adopted, by a Tasmanian couple. The narrative cuts to him in his 20s, at which point he is grown up and haunted by the question: where is my home?

A touching, heart-wrenching, Kleenex-destroying true story, with true-to-life detail that is an achievement in itself: filming at the train station where the character originally got lost, the orphanage, the town he was born in, down to the manner in which he obsessively surfed Google Earth to find where he came from, dismissed, incorrectly, by some as poor writing.

Kidman is stunning as the uncompromisingly loving mother and Dev Patel is in full bloom as both a silver screen star and a seasoned actor. But the real gem is the discovery of Sunny Pawar, the little boy found to play the titular role, chosen from amongst thousands of children who had auditioned.

For those fans of Slumdog Millionaire (2008), whilst the comparison is unfair, one thing that film did touch upon was the poverty and threat of exploitation that children living in India faced every day. Upon viewing Lion, Slumdog feels like it was shot by people who spent too much time living in the penthouse suite of the Four Seasons and whose idea of poverty had to be glossed over with Michael Bay-esque filters and lenses.

The final scenes and revelations in Lion are some of the most painful moments you’ll see in any film. It is a masterful testament to memory, the search for identity, and the power of the drive to find that most abstract of concepts: home.