This is an old-fashioned drama that could have been made at any time over the last 30 years or so without looking any differently. Dev Patel is Srinivasa Ramanujan, a young man living in poverty in India who has a brilliant mathematical mind. Spotted and sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, he is mentored by prickly professor G.H. Hardy, though finds other people at the university resistant to his ideas.
It is an amiable enough film with its main plot points signposted from a long way away – one of the characters starts coughing half way through the film and you know that their demise will happen before the film ends. It is also, as a layman, hard to get too excited about some of the mathematical breakthroughs, and it is only with the end credits their significance is really revealed.
The film is enlivened by a nice turn by Toby Jones as Littlewood, and by the relationship between Ramanujan and Hardy that is much more interesting than that between Ramanujan and his wife. Jeremy Irons is outstanding as Hardy, and it is largely thanks to him that his final scenes with Patel are quite moving.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10