This is one of those ‘triumph against the odds’ tales that will get folks to the theatres; stories of inspiration and reunions to tug at the heartstrings and grab you by the emotional cockles as the music swells. One of those tear-jerking crowd-pleasers, but artful at the same time-type things. It’s very well made, and full credit must go to director Garth Davis, who dares to focus at least half his narrative on a six-year-old Indian kiddie with no acting experience who doesn’t speak English.

Odd awards categories aside (how the Academy and others deem top billed Dev Patel ‘supporting’ actor is anyone’s guess), most everything about the film is of the highest calibre. Patel’s Australian accent is flawless (and that’s not something you can say that often), and his performance combines a wealth of vulnerability, passion and loss. Nicole Kidman has a few scenes to shine through her historically accurate, if distracting wig. Rooney Mara has not a great deal to do with an underwritten role, and full credit goes to the tiny Sunny Pawar for handling more than his fair share of screen time as the five-year-old Saroo.

If there is a downside to the film, it’s that the crux of it – the fact that adult Saroo uses Google Earth to locate his original homeland – this is not the kind of thing that lends itself to compelling cinema: click; scroll; click; scroll; zoom; click; repeat.

I get the fact that it’s how the story happened in real life, that’s fine, and they’re being faithful to both the facts and to the book upon which the film is based. But the inherent problem with this is that a chap looking at a computer screen and pushing pins into a map of India doesn’t make for a very propulsive filmic narrative, and large swathes of Lion’s third act is taken up with these scenes. I think, and I could be missing something here, that the adaptation is lacking in that sense.

Comparisons as there may be to Slumdog Millionaire are as lazy as they are misapplied – the film’s central premise more than just its setting and the plight of lost kiddies in the sub-continent. Lion is a sober and often quite stirring meditation on family, identity and loss, but one which is buoyed by the real-life knowledge that there’s bound to be a happy ending attached to it.

While everything about the film is admirable enough, there was something lacking in the telling of this tale which ultimately kept me at a distance.