Once upon a time, a little boy fell asleep on a train and woke up thousands of miles from home.

This is the story of Saroo Brierley, an Australian who, when he was a five year old in India, got separated from his family and after many twists and turns was adopted by a family in Australia. Once he grew up, he used Google Earth to find out where he was from. It’s a heart-tugging story that doesn’t entirely shy away from the difficulties of trans-culture adoption, explores the question of “what is home?” and manages the difficult task of “how do you make someone using Google Earth interesting to watch?”

The story begins in 1987 in Northern India, when five year old Saroo (played by the utterly charming Sunny Pawar) and his brother head off to find some work to help their mother and younger sister. Saroo proves to be too young, and is told by his brother to wait at the train station, and when his brother doesn’t come back, he crawls into an empty train and falls asleep. The train takes off while he’s still sleeping, and days pass before it stops and he can get off – in Calcutta, well over a thousand miles away, where people speak Bengali, and Saroo only speaks Hindi.

Eventually he ends up in an orphanage, and after no one can figure out where he’s from or who he belongs to, he’s adopted by a couple in Australia. Later on, the couple adopts another boy from India, Mantosh. Twenty years later, he meets an American student, Lucy, (Rooney Mara) and a few other Indian students. He remembers bits of his life before Australia, and uses Google Earth to trace where his journey had taken him, eventually returning to home and his mother.

This movie is beautiful. Dev Patel is utterly fantastic as the adult Saroo (and by the way, he was also “cute” and “adorable” and now he’s SMOKING HOT. It’s not quite a Neville Longbottoming, but it’s in the category).

He goes through a lot of emotions while he searches: he doesn’t want to seem ungrateful to his parents (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) but he also feels awful that his mother never knew what happened to him. It’s a case where he doesn’t quite feel like he has permission to feel all his feelings, especially when it seemed clear to me that tiny Saroo made a choice to accept the Brierleys as his family.

Mantosh doesn’t make the adjustment well. It is abundantly clear that being adopted offers a much better life than staying in the orphanage, but neither he nor Saroo are “blank pages” and come with a lot of trauma. A woman I worked with several years ago adopted a five year old boy from India, and it was still a work in progress when I left that job.  While there really isn’t any discussion about the two boys losing their culture (the Breirleys keep the boys’ names, which I think is important), it’s clear that this wasn’t just a simple “here you go, here’s your room and a television, everything is great!” transition. Even Saroo didn’t prepare them for the challenges Mantosh presented, just like any subsequent child.

Tiny Saroo’s adventures in Calcutta are upsetting. I would not recommend this movie for Sarah, or anyone else who does not handle “children in peril” well. He’s always ultimately safe, but it’s due to luck and his own good instincts, not because bad things weren’t possible. And bad things do happen to other children. He’s lost, and alone, and can’t speak the language, and when he does find adults who want to help him, they don’t recognize the name of his village, and he doesn’t know his mother’s name (“What’s your mother’s name?” “Mum.”). It’s upsetting.

We’ve seen in modern movies how difficult it can be to make computers dramatic. Spotlight did a pretty good job of it, and as Saroo is searching through the Google Earth images, it’s cut with flashes of the memory of a five year old – a scared, hungry, lonely five year old. It works pretty well.

This is based on the book by the actual Saroo, A Long Way Home ( A | BN | K | AB ), which I have not read (yet). It’s been nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Dev Patel, Best Supporting Actress for Nicole Kidman, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Score.

It’s easily one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, and, if you can handle the parts with children in peril, I highly recommend it.

Lion is in theaters now and tickets (US) are available at Fandango and Moviefone.