Brave film about a lost boy has an understated power

It’s a small world, but you can still get lost in it. That’s what happened to five-year-old Saroo Brierley (Sunny Pawar) in 1986, when he got trapped alone in a train carriage in the central Indian city of Khandwa, and wasn’t able to escape until a stop in Calcutta, 1,500 kilometres away.

Director Garth Davis expertly tells this early episode in the life of Saroo as a near-silent movie; there is little dialogue, and once the boy regains his freedom, he is in a region where people speak Bengali, not his native Hindi. He has no way of finding the rest of his family, including his beloved elder brother Guddu.

We’re about 50 minutes into the film before Saroo is adopted by John and Sue Brierley from Hobart, Australia, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham. In the interim, Saroo survived on the streets and then in a state orphanage, where the staff are not unkind but don’t have the resources to track down his impoverished, uneducated mother, even if they knew where to look for her.

Cut to 20 years later. Saroo, now played by Dev Patel, has blossomed into a handsome, confident young man, although his adopted brother Mantosh (Divian Ladwa) has had a less successful time of it. This is not the story of white westerners rescuing poor Indians from themselves.

A word on the title: Saroo’s autobiography is called A Long Way Home, though neither that nor Lion makes a particularly memorable movie name. But the film ends with a brief explanation that proves to be yet another heartstring-pulling moment. No wonder this brave story was a runner-up for the people’s choice prize at the Toronto film festival. It could roar if it wanted to, but settles for an expressive, almost infrasonic growl.