Last Man in Tower Review: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Last Man in Tower is a quietly devastating film anchored by career-best performances from Manoj Bajpayee and Divya Dutta, turning a Mumbai redevelopment dispute into a sharp meditation on greed, loneliness, and the fine line between principle and selfishness.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Genre: Drama
Runtime: Around 97 minutes
Director: Ben Rekhi
Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Boman Irani, Divya Dutta
What happens when a builder offers your entire housing society a fortune to sell, and every single neighbour agrees except you? In a city like Mumbai, where redevelopment has practically become a way of life, that simple question has the power to turn neighbours into enemies and friends into manipulators.
Based on Aravind Adiga’s novel, Last Man in Tower takes exactly this conflict and turns it into a sharp, deeply unsettling study of ambition, greed, loneliness, and the complicated business of letting go.
At the center of it all is Yogesh Mishra, a retired schoolteacher played brilliantly by Manoj Bajpayee, who lives in a home filled with memories of his late wife. While the rest of his neighbours quickly agree to sell after receiving a lucrative offer from a builder, Yogesh refuses, insisting that they have every legal right to say no and should not be pressured into abandoning their homes.
What makes the film genuinely compelling is that it never paints Yogesh as a simple hero standing against a building full of greedy neighbours. Every single person around him has a real, understandable reason to sell. A mother raising a special needs child wants a better future for him.
A single mother wants to send her daughter abroad for her education. Another man simply wants to pay off crushing debt. The film treats all of these motivations with genuine empathy, which makes the growing conflict feel far more complicated than a simple battle between right and wrong.
What starts as a disagreement over property and principle slowly curdles into something darker, a story about coercion and quiet, creeping pressure. An elderly couple eventually gives in after being attacked by masked men. Yogesh’s own lawyer essentially tells him to just take the money and move on.
Workers who initially raised safety concerns suddenly change their tune once enough money gets offered. Perhaps the film’s sharpest observation is that in Mumbai, money does not just buy property, it can buy silence, loyalty, and even morality itself.
The housing society itself becomes one of the film’s most fascinating characters, with its redevelopment meetings, evening gossip, shifting alliances, and casual moral policing feeling instantly recognizable to anyone who has lived in a similar building.
A single woman becomes the target of vicious gossip simply for having male visitors, while Yogesh, in his stubbornly righteous way, reminds everyone that privacy is a basic right, not something to be casually violated.
Divya Dutta is genuinely superb as Sangeeta Puri, a mother whose special needs son shares a close bond with Yogesh, making her attempts to convince him to sell all the more uncomfortable to watch. Her performance carries real emotional complexity, letting pain, envy, and desperation play across her face without needing much dialogue to sell it.
Manoj Bajpayee, though, is the true heart of the film. He never simply performs old age. Instead, small details, a slight quiver, slower movements, a changed posture around his son, make Yogesh feel startlingly real.
His strained relationship with his son adds another layer of quiet heartbreak, particularly in a moment where his son admits that Yogesh’s constant need to be right has never made him easy to love.
Boman Irani is delightfully unsettling as the calm, persuasive builder, never leaning into obvious villainy but instead playing someone genuinely fascinated by a man who simply cannot be bought.
At just under 100 minutes, the film stays crisp without ever feeling rushed, and its ending lands as genuinely heartbreaking, leaving behind an uncomfortable question about when standing by your principles quietly becomes its own form of selfishness.
If you’re deciding what else to catch in theatres this week, our full review of Haiwaan, the Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan reunion that unfortunately falls flat, is worth a read before you pick your ticket.