There is no zombie film, no torture porn picture that can match the horrors or pathos of “Bhopal” A Prayer for Rain.” The worst industrial accident in history makes a harrowing backdrop for a disaster film, and gripping melodrama.
This semi-fictionalized account of events that led up to a release of over 30 tons of poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) into the air by a factory surrounded by an Indian slum is all about the foreshadowing.
There’s the Union Carbide chief (Martin Sheen) who visits the pesticide plant, with its aged out-of-date technology, gets his hands dirty, yells at the lax safety regulations and “Indianization” of the factory he championed to “build better farmers” for India. But India is in a drought, so the company is losing money.
The plant safety inspector (Joy Sengupta) sputters in fear at the impoverished workforce’s lack of training, at the insistence of the local bosses that “we cannot stop production” for maintenance, that every near-disaster can be shrugged off “as long as we’re learning from our mistakes.”
Then there’s the haphazard local journalist (Kal Penn) whose UFO headlines and frequent print retractions undercut his constant efforts to expose that what Union Carbide is doing is dangerous.
The warnings were there, in hindsight. But as the film opens, Sheen’s company chairman Warren Anderson is sputtering at the first reports out of “that godforsaken slum,” that “I never should have trusted ‘those stupid people,'” and already thinking “damage control.”
In flashback, we see the world that grew up around this plant, which in ten short years had attracted a populous slum surrounding it. A mishap kills a worker, but that’s an opportunity for Dilip (Rajpal Yadav), a floor sweeper who finds himself promoted to maintenance gauge-watcher. He doesn’t know why he does what he does, or what the gauges mean. He only knows that he’ll be able to feed his family and provide a dowry for his younger sister.
The company line, that MIC is “harmless” and akin to the effects of tear gas, is swallowed by all — company men, loyal employees, even a local doctor.
But Motwani (Penn) smells the foul air, sees people getting sick and hunts for answers about this dead worker, a man “murdered by Union Carbide.” In what comes closest to the film’s big false step, he coerces a foreign features photographer (Mischa Barton) into confronting the visiting Anderson about the plant’s safety.
“We’re not making perfume here, miss.”
The 30 years that have passed, with a payout from the company that devalues Indian deaths and an India that is dashing from Third World to First World, contributes to a surprising even-handedness in the story. Locals bragging about “Indianization” — cheap, ill-conceived shortcuts for “efficiency” — callous supervisors and government officials who only voice concern that the plant might close, costing jobs , get equal villainous billing to the multi-national corporation which opened a factory that would never have passed muster in modern America.
Penn stands out among the performers, summoning up a thick Indian accent that his American roles rarely require. He gives this reporter a sort of righteous amorality, ends-justify-the-means ethos. It’s no wonder that his warnings fell on mostly deaf ears. He was “crying wolf” too often.
Co-writer/director Ravi Kumar does a wonderful job of building suspense as this long flashback brings people and events together for that one tragic night in December of 1984, when as few as 4,000 or as many as 16,000 people died — choking, vomiting, bleeding from their mouths, hurling themselves into waste water ponds to escape the deadly gas.
It’s a violent, shocking and moving sequence and a painful reminder that whatever the U.S. Supreme Court says about corporations enjoying the same rights as people, we have yet to see a company get the death penalty for mass murder — here or abroad.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with scenes of graphic, bloody suffering and death
Cast: Kal Penn, Martin Sheen,Rajpal Yadav, Misha Barton, Tannishtha Chatterjee
Credits: Directed by Ravi Kumar, written by Ravi Kumar and David Brooks. A Revolver/Sahara release.
Running time: 1:36