We are living in an age of what feels like near-constant terror attacks on a global scale, from the coordinated attacks of extremist groups to the domestic terrorism of shootings at schools and other public spaces. A movie that focuses very close attention on one such event is sure to find itself amid a landscape rife with tension—which is why it’s interesting to behold the bold yet careful choices that director Anthony Maras makes in Hotel Mumbai, a film that takes a 360-degree view of the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, with a specific focus on the historic and luxurious Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
Hotel Mumbai recounts these events through a nominally diverse set of perspectives, embodied by its largely fictionalized cast of characters. These include hotel employee and waiter Arjun (Dev Patel), head chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher), Russian businessman Vasili (Jacob Isaacs) and visiting American couple David (Armie Hammer) and Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi), who are trying to stay together and find their newborn baby. The characters intersect in various combinations over the course of the traumatizing night, all in their efforts to escape the hotel and find their ways back to one another.
One of the first and most striking choices Hotel Mumbai makes is to enter the minds, hearts and perspectives of the attackers. The film does this before anything else, and it does it repeatedly. It opens with the group of young men riding up on a boat, equipped with bulky, full-sized backpacks, all receiving instructions through headsets that tell them that they are doing important work in service of God. This is the beginning of a strange trend in the film, which continues through the terrorists’ friendly banter with one another in the midst of their gruesome work and the emotional conflict that we sometimes see them undergo. In one scene, they joke around about mistaking vegetables for meat; in another, one of the attackers, Imran (Amandeep Singh), has an emotional phone call with his father while wounded in the leg.
For the most part, the odd ways in which we are coaxed into sympathizing with the terrorists are cut short by the horrific violence that nearly always follows. Imran is hurt and crying; he also performs several summary executions not long after this phone call. There are times when Hotel Mumbai feels less like a thriller and more like a horror movie, and it never lets you forget that these horrors are all too real and all too close in our actual world. Sometimes this approach almost feels overdone—it feels strange to watch a movie in deep suspense, and think about how so many people experienced a much more dangerous version of this suspense in real time, not for entertainment. What the violence does accomplish is nipping any seeds of sympathy for the attackers in the bud over and over again—and each time, not a moment too soon.
The bottle effect of the movie is that the viewer truly feel as though they are watching a live documenting of the tragedy unfolding, step by step. Some of the moments, when the narration switches over to live reporters at news outlets or handheld footage, evoke the terrifying moments that the world has witnessed, time and time again, through cell phone videos. The concept of watching a traumatic event is right at the forefront the whole time, although the film does try to gear it in a productive direction, honing in on the characters’ relationships with each other—David and Zahra’s storyline is particularly well rendered—and focusing on the heroism of hotel employees like Hemant Oberoi and Arjun, who take tremendous risks and sacrifice personal safety in order to keep their guests secure.
Ultimately, it’s hard to tell whether the final takeaway is meant to be this heroism or the meaningless cruelty that abounds in the world and the trauma to which it subjects innocent people. Certainly, both are present, and both hit close to home in the wake of recent events like the shootings at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. The film’s release was delayed in New Zealand after these events, but there are likely many, in New Zealand and around the world, who would be hurt by watching this movie, no matter the window of time. This is one of the elements that makes the film’s approach induce queasiness at times—it feels like a terrorism movie meant almost exclusively for the outside viewer.
It’s difficult and bizarre to understand the reality of these events and then turn to a thriller on the subject and expect to be entertained, but it’s also crucial that we commemorate those lives lost as fittingly and respectfully as we can. Hotel Mumbai falls somewhere in the middle, forcing us to examine the three-dimensional societal shortcomings that enable horrific events to take place—poverty, manipulation—but ultimately attempting to circle back around to the innocent and heroic lives which deserve our attention the most. It’s the places where that attention feels less critical and more exploitative that the film falls short.
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