‘Last Man In Tower’ movie review: Manoj Bajpayee elevates this timely portrait of middle-class desperation

At the heart of Last Man in Tower lies Vishram Cooperative Housing Society, a decaying, close-knit enclave of middle-class Mumbai families. Their world is upended when a ruthless real estate tycoon, Dharmen Shah (Boman Irani), offers them a life-changing financial windfall to buy out the building for luxury redevelopment. The catch is that the payout is all or nothing, contingent on a unanimous vote. While his cash-strapped neighbours eagerly scramble for a ticket into the modern world, Yogesh Mishra (Manoj Bajpayee), a retired schoolteacher known as Masterji, stubbornly refuses to sign away the home that holds the memories of his deceased wife. What begins as a disagreement quickly degenerates into a psychological social pressure cooker, as the neighborhood’s collective desperation, led by the chirpy Sangeeta Puri (Divya Dutta), turns into targeted malice against the lone dissenter.Directed by Ben Rekhi, this study of greed, based on Aravind Adiga’s eponymous English novel, probes whether rapid urbanisation and privatisation truly push society forward, or do they simply widen the chasm between people, ruthlessly muzzling the moments and memories that once held them together. The lucrative offer transforms cooperative neighbours into suspicious adversaries. The narrative depicts the moral collapse and asks how easily peer pressure, fear, and financial temptation can turn ordinary people against dissenting neighbours.Last Man in Tower (Hindi)Director: Ben RekhiDuration: 97 minutesCast: Manoj Bajpayee, Divya Dutta, Boman Irani, Sukant GoelSynopsis: When a retired schoolteacher stubbornly refuses to sell his flat despite a lucrative real estate redevelopment offer, his resistance pits him against his own neighbours.The police pay little heed to his harassment, the legal system bogs him down in official delays, and the local machinery works as an extension of the developer. The visual of Masterji systematically crossing out the primary pillars of democracy from his notepad is the film’s most devastating symbolic sequence. The bemused builder can’t put a price on Masterji’s soul, but when his son (Sukant Goel is impressive) also sees him as a wall unyielding to the future, the betrayal cuts to the bones. Rekhi emphasises the decaying, lived-in texture of the housing society and uses it as a visual metaphor. The camera lingers on the menacing scale of vertical ambition and also captures the shrinking of Masterji’s world. Divya Dutta in ‘Last Man In Tower’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement That said, Adiga’s tragicomic tone often lives in the internal contradictions, hypocrisies, and petty thoughts of the building’s residents. Cinema naturally externalises internal thoughts. Sooni Taraporevala, who has masterfully adapted some big books before for screen, keeps the soul intact, and Juhi Chaturvedi’s dialogues keep the situations lifelike in translation, but there are passages where the neighbours’ petty bickering and escalating cruelty play out as straight, tense drama rather than dark comedy.Moreover, when Adiga conceived this story, Mumbai’s redevelopment boom was in its infancy, a contentious, evolving phenomenon that still invited diverse points of view. Today, that boom has solidified into an irreversible, institutionalised process. This structural shift in the real world leaves the film’s central conflict feeling somewhat jaded, as in the contemporary real estate landscape, the battle for spaces like the Vishram Society has already been decisively fought, lost, and laid to rest.It works more as a he-said-so, for we can see around us a growing submission of the middle class to the whims of the market and surrender to the bully next door. It makes us feel the pain of shrinking community spaces, where the loss of common ground inevitably narrows the human heart within.Manoj is being Manoj. Masked behind thick-rimmed glasses and armed with a ubiquitous umbrella, the actor portrays Masterji’s defiance with exhausting dignity. As someone in danger of being swept away by the modern world, his performance rests on slumped shoulders, heavy sighs, and eyes that register deep betrayal every time a lifelong neighbour turns against him. While Masterji doesn’t have the poetic depth of Prof Siras (Aligarh), the teacher who perhaps taught physics is as compelling in the gravity of his conviction. Boman Irani in ‘Last Man In Tower’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement The schoolteacher has served as a vital ideological anchor in Hindi cinema, a principled figure deployed to resist cosmetic change and moral decay. If this film had been made a decade ago, Anupam Kher would have been the quintessential choice for Masterji. Watching the film brought back memories of Anupam’s iconic roles in Saraansh and Salaakhen, but in Adiga’s ruthless universe, the traditional narrative catharsis is dismantled. Here, the righteous old schoolteacher finds no humble student willing to rise to the occasion and defend his ideals. Similarly, the classic trope of a son avenging his father’s humiliation is entirely inverted. Manoj is alive to this structural cynicism and to his rigid, borderline irrational pride, which Adiga’s text reflects, even if the screen time doesn’t allow enough to develop the character’s psychological layers fully.The screenplay does deliver a sobering truth. The traditional hero is obsolete, and no singular villain exists to fight. The antagonist is the collective desperation of the middle class. The neighbours are not malicious monsters. They are ordinary families suffocated by the urban grind. They feel one old man’s rigid principles stand directly in the way of their only shot at a better life. Divya Dutta represents this threat next door. She keeps Mrs. Puri from becoming a caricature. As the mother of a disabled child who loves to spend time with Masterji, she brilliantly voices the ambiguity of human relations and the simmering hostility of the Vishram Society because her malice feels justified from her perspective.While Boman Irani consciously distances himself from the loud, comedic villainy of Khosla Ka Ghosla to deliver a sleeker brand of corporate greed, pushing the envelope here is an uphill battle. The writing and world-building trap Boman in a familiar mould, much like the central conflict, making it hard for his real estate tycoon to outrun the shadow.Last Man In Tower is currently running in theatres