The Least of These The Graham Staines Story movie review: A wasted opportunity

Done right, a film on the barbaric crime should have functioned as an act of setting to rights, as well as a cautionary tale. The Least Of These is simply not done well enough, to achieve either of these things.

Manav (Joshi) is a rookie journalist who is determined to please his boss, whose only brief is to nail Graham Staines (Baldwin), the local missionary who lives a life of compassion, on a charge of forced conversion.

We see our intrepid journo sneaking up on Staines and his happy family– wife and three children–as they go about keeping their leprosy home going by sheer dint of will and goodwill. He is to be found creeping up on what he thinks is a ‘forced’ conversion, and shouting to all and sundry: but I am a journalist. Not once do we find him thinking about ethics or morals, especially not when he is up against a low-income future and a wife in hospital with a newborn baby, Joshi tries to make the most of a thankless part, but he is a good actor stuck in a series of badly-written, no-account roles, and that is a pity.

Prakash Belawadi plays the bigoted editor with a smirk and a sly grin. Why is he like that? We don’t know. Why are his backers like that? No clear answer. The villagers are illiterate and will do anything for free liquor, even burn innocent humans alive. That this is the most simplistic of all arguments doesn’t seem to bother the filmmakers.

The intention–of setting the record straight–is noble, but The Least Of These makes no attempt at delving deeper. This should have been an important film, given our hate-filled times. The life and the unimaginably brutal death of Staines, the man at the centre of this story, and the out-of-the-ordinary choices he made, is an eminently worthy story. Too bad the film is less than ordinary.