Hotel Mumbai

[peter]

In this viceral telling of the 2008 Taj Mumbai hotel attack Dev Patel co-stars as a young waiter who arriving for work finds himself shortly thereafter in what must rank as one of the worst terrorist atrocities of the modern era. As part of a wider series of attacks, the hotel became the hunting ground of a group of heavily armed extremists who trawled the building, shooting and killing, bombing and burning in indiscriminate fashion as they progressed from floor to floor. The film pulls no punches in it's recreation of the events, and does not shy away from depicting the brutal reality of the scene, or succumb to the temptation to glamorise or inflate the degree of resistance that the terrified hostages (both hidden and not) were able to mount. What emerges is a gut-churning recreation of humanity at it's worst, with occasional glimpses of what it can rise to (mostly courtesy of Patel) when such demands of it are made.

There is nothing I think I would change about this film. I thank the producers in Australia and the director Anthony Maras and urge you to seek it out.