Lion (2016) Review – A Lost Child, Google Earth and the Long Way Home

★★★★☆ Our Rating: 8.5/10

There is a moment early in Lion when a five-year-old boy wakes alone on a moving train, calls his brother’s name through a locked carriage, and realises nobody is coming. The film never really lets go of that feeling — and neither, for twenty-five years, did the real man it happened to. Any worthwhile Lion review has to admit something upfront: this is a film engineered to make audiences cry, it makes no apology for that, and the reason it works is that the true story underneath is almost impossible to hear with dry eyes. What separates Lion from ordinary tearjerkers is how patiently, and how beautifully, it earns its emotion.

Directed by Garth Davis in his feature-film debut and written by Luke Davies, Lion adapts A Long Way Home, the memoir by Saroo Brierley. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September 2016 and went on to receive six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and to win BAFTA Awards for Dev Patel’s performance and Davies’s adapted screenplay. It is an Australian-led co-production filmed across India and Tasmania, and its structure is a gamble: the first half belongs almost entirely to a small child who barely speaks English, and the famous adult star does not properly arrive until the film is half over.

That gamble is the film. Davis, who came from television and commercials — he had co-directed the acclaimed series Top of the Lake — understood that if the child’s journey did not stand on its own, no amount of adult searching could rescue it. So Lion plays, for its first hour, like a survival story told at knee height, and only then becomes a different, quieter film about memory, guilt and the strange technology that let a lost man draw a circle on a map and look for his mother inside it.

Quick Facts: Lion at a Glance

The Story: Two Halves, One Search (Spoiler-Free)

In 1986, in a poor village in Madhya Pradesh, five-year-old Saroo lives with his mother Kamla, who carries stones for a living, his older brother Guddu, whom he worships, and a baby sister. One night Saroo insists on accompanying Guddu to look for night work at a nearby station. Told to wait on a bench, the exhausted child climbs into an empty train carriage and falls asleep — and wakes to find the train moving, the doors locked, and Guddu nowhere on board. The train, a decommissioned service being moved across the country, carries him some 1,600 kilometres to Calcutta, a vast city where he does not speak the language, cannot pronounce his home town’s name correctly, and does not even know it well enough to describe.

What follows is the film’s extraordinary first movement: Saroo alone. He sleeps in stations and underpasses, scavenges food, narrowly escapes adults whose kindness curdles into danger, and is eventually taken into an orphanage. Unable to trace his family from the little he can tell them, the authorities put him up for overseas adoption, and he is chosen by Sue and John Brierley, a warm, well-off couple in Hobart, Tasmania. The film then leaps forward. Adult Saroo, played by Dev Patel, is a confident, funny, thoroughly Australian young man studying hotel management, in love with fellow student Lucy, and — on the surface — entirely at peace with who he is.

The peace is a performance. A taste of jalebi, the sweet from his childhood, at an Indian friend’s dinner party cracks something open, and Saroo begins, secretly and then obsessively, to search Google Earth for the station with the water tower his child’s memory has kept. He is looking, as he admits, for a village whose name he may have been mispronouncing his whole life, using fragments — a fountain, a bridge, the time a train carried a sleeping boy — as his only measurements. He hides the search from the Brierleys, terrified of wounding the parents who saved him, and the hiding corrodes his relationship, his studies and his health. How the search ends, and what it costs everyone it touches, is the film’s destination and we will not spoil it — though viewers who know the true story will find that knowing the ending in advance does not protect them at all.

Performances: A Child Carries the Film, Then Patel Carries Its Conscience

Sunny Pawar as young Saroo gives one of the finest child performances ever filmed, full stop. Pawar was cast from thousands of children in India and had never acted; Davis shoots him largely in observation, letting long stretches play through his face — watchfulness, terror, sudden delight at a found piece of food. Because the child Saroo cannot explain himself, the performance is physical: how he runs, how he tests whether an adult is safe, how he says his brother’s name to strangers like a password. Every later scene in the film draws power from what Pawar established, and it is no exaggeration to say he sets a standard his adult co-star then has to meet.

Dev Patel as adult Saroo meets it, in the performance that transformed his career. Patel, then still widely associated with Slumdog Millionaire and lighter roles, rebuilt himself for this part — Australian accent, longer hair, a body carrying visible tension — and plays Saroo’s obsession as a slow possession. His best scenes are the dishonest ones: smiling at family dinners while a map is open in his head, snapping at Lucy, and one confrontation with Sue that Patel plays not as rebellion but as a man begging to be stopped. He won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor — a category placement that fooled nobody; in his half of the film, he is its lead in every sense.

Nicole Kidman as Sue Brierley does career-best quiet work and received an Oscar nomination for it. Sue could easily have been written as a saintly rescuer; Kidman and the script instead give her grief, stubbornness and one late, devastating monologue that reframes her entire life — a scene we will describe no further, except to say it answers a question the audience has been asking about her for an hour and changes what the film is about. David Wenham as John Brierley provides warmth in a smaller register, the family’s ballast. Rooney Mara as Lucy is slightly underwritten — the girlfriend who must absorb Saroo’s withdrawal is a familiar figure — but Mara plays her with enough intelligence and hurt to register as a person, not a device. In India, Priyanka Bose as Kamla, Saroo’s birth mother, appears briefly in the child’s half and haunts the film thereafter; Abhishek Bharate as Guddu makes the brother vivid enough that a small boy shouting his name in a Calcutta crowd breaks your heart; and Divian Ladwa as Mantosh, the Brierleys’ other adopted son, whose troubles are sketched rather than explored, points to a harder story the film only touches.

Direction and Technical Craft

Davis’s direction is classical and confident, and Greig Fraser’s cinematography is the film’s second star. Fraser shoots India at a child’s eye level, in heat and dust and sodium light, finding compositions of real grandeur — a tiny figure in a station the size of a cathedral — without ever turning poverty into a postcard. The Tasmanian material is cooler, wider and calmer, and the film’s visual argument is made entirely in that contrast: the boy’s world was chaos and colour; the man’s world is safe, spacious and somehow airless. Editor Alexandre de Franceschi handles the film’s riskiest transitions — memory flashes triggered by taste and sound, satellite imagery dissolving into real landscape — with a restraint that keeps sentiment from spilling into manipulation most of the time.

Honesty requires naming where the film wobbles. The second half is inevitably less propulsive than the first: a man alone in a room with a laptop is a hard thing to dramatise, and the film repeats the rhythm of search, hope and collapse once too often. The adult section also compresses years of obsession into montages that simplify how consuming the real search was, and Mantosh’s storyline, as noted, is raised and set aside. Some viewers, fairly, find the final act’s emotional directness overwhelming by design — this is a film that wants your tears and arranges its last twenty minutes to collect them. Whether that is manipulation or simply a true story told at full feeling is the main argument audiences still have about Lion, and both positions are defensible. Ours is that the first hour’s discipline buys the ending its emotion honestly.

Music and Background Score

The score, by Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka (the pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann), is built around solo piano and prepared-piano textures that sound, aptly, like memory: familiar notes altered by something caught in the strings. It stays low under the India sequences, where the sound design of stations, crowds and trains carries the realism, and opens up as Saroo’s search becomes the story. The film’s best-known musical moment is Sia’s closing song “Never Give Up,” written for the film, which plays the credits out on a note of uplift; it is effective, if more conventionally rousing than the score that precedes it. The soundtrack also threads Indian popular music through both halves — including A. R. Rahman’s “Urvasi Urvasi” at the dinner party that first cracks Saroo open — using shared musical memory, rather than dialogue, to connect the two worlds Saroo lives between.

What Works and What Doesn’t

What we loved:

• Sunny Pawar’s astonishing debut — a child performance for the ages that powers the entire film
• Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman at career-best level in the second half
• Greig Fraser’s cinematography and the film’s patient, knee-height telling of the child’s journey
• A true story structured boldly, withholding its adult star for half the running time
• Emotional honesty about adoption: gratitude and guilt, love for two families at once

What could be better:

• The Google Earth search section repeats its beats and loses momentum after the flawless first hour
• Lucy and Mantosh are both thinner on the page than the actors playing them deserve
• The final act presses hard for tears; viewers who resist direct sentiment may feel pushed
• The adult years are heavily compressed compared with the richly detailed childhood section

Box Office: A $12 Million Drama That Found the Whole World

For a mid-budget drama with no franchise and half its dialogue subtitled, Lion was a major commercial success. Made for about $12 million, it grossed roughly $140.9 million worldwide — about $51 million of that in North America — rolling out slowly from a Toronto premiere in September 2016 through an awards-season release that kept it in cinemas for months. In Australia it became one of the most successful local releases of its year, and its performance confirmed that Patel had become a genuine international draw. The awards run matched the money: six Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Patel and Best Supporting Actress for Kidman, with BAFTA wins for Patel and for Luke Davies’s screenplay. Few $12 million films, before or since, have travelled this far on nothing but word of mouth and audiences telling their friends to bring tissues.

Verdict: Should You Watch It?

Yes — and watch it in one sitting, phone away, because its power is cumulative. Lion is the rare awards drama that plays just as strongly to viewers who know nothing about it: a lost child’s survival story, a grown man’s quiet breakdown, and a closing movement that lands like very little else in modern popular cinema. Its flaws are second-half flaws — pacing, compression, a supporting character or two short-changed — and they sit beside a first hour that is close to perfect.

Our rating: 8.5/10 — a beautifully acted, honestly earned tearjerker built on one of the great true stories of the Google age.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Lion based on a true story?
Yes. It is based on Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, about his separation from his family in India at age five, his adoption by John and Sue Brierley in Tasmania, and his search, as an adult, using Google Earth. The film’s closing section acknowledges the real people directly.

Why is the film called Lion?
The title comes from Saroo’s childhood mispronunciation of his own name. As a small child he pronounced it “Sheru” — which in Hindi means “lion” — and officials recorded it as Saroo. The explanation is given within the film’s story.

How much of Lion is in Hindi and Bengali?
A significant portion of the first half is in Hindi and Bengali with subtitles, reflecting young Saroo’s experience — including the fact that in Calcutta he could not understand the Bengali spoken around him. The second half is mainly in English.

Did Lion win any Oscars?
It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but did not win on the night. It did win two BAFTA Awards — Best Supporting Actor for Dev Patel and Best Adapted Screenplay for Luke Davies — among many other honours.

Where can I watch Lion?
It is widely available on streaming, rental and disc in most regions, including regular rotation on major platforms. Availability changes by country, so check your local services.