So good I watched it twice: Netflix’s The White Tiger reviewed

The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, 99 Homes) who also wrote the screenplay. It stars Adarsh Gourav, otherwise a songwriter and singer. It’s a rags-to-riches story set in India but it’s not at all a typical rags-to-riches story set in India. Those are some of the things you probably should know, but there is only one thing I want you to know: it is wonderful and, even though the subject matter is often chilling, and there’s simmering rage, and murder, it’s still two hours of boisterous, dazzling, swaggering fun. I watched it once and thought: I could easily watch that again. So I did. Unheard of. And one last thing I want you to know: Bahrani may be a genius.

Like the novel, the film is framed by letters from Balram (Gourav) — a successful Bangalore entrepreneur and the self-styled ‘White Tiger’ of the title — to the Chinese premier, who is due to visit the country and possibly needs educating about ‘the new India’. (As Balram’s witty, pithy and ultimately psychopathic voiceover puts it: ‘I think we can agree America is so yesterday and China and India are so tomorrow.’) Balram confesses he is wanted for murder and then proceeds to recount his own life, which began in a rural village where his father was a poor rickshaw-puller who died of TB after a two-day walk to a hospital where there were no doctors. He was, he tells the Chinese leader, born into ‘the darkness’ that is poverty. He expected greater things for himself as he was exceptionally bright at school, but alas, once his father died, he was pulled from education to help support the family.