World’s Best (2023) Movie Review

World’s Best (2023) Review: A coming-of-age tale never gets old. No matter how often you may have watched a protagonist feeling lost and clueless about their direction in life, epiphanies are always welcome, bringing along smiles and sobs. Most coming-of-age tales are centered around high school students because they occupy that juncture between tweenhood and adulthood that gives them the perfect scope to explore and understand the many realities of life. Interestingly, World’s Best (2023), directed by Roshan Sethi, takes us into the life of a middle school kid, Prem Patel, a genius at math, and packs the themes of grief, identity, and growing up into a 100 minutes-long film that is equally poignant and charming.

The film begins by taking us through the contours of one of Prem Patel’s (played by Manny Magnus) dreams. Unlike the kind of dreams that you’ll imagine middle schoolers get, Prem dreams of delivering an outstanding performance at a Mathlympics competition. As he gets pulled into reality, I imagined that perhaps we have the story of an underdog in math here. I was quickly proved wrong because Prem is actually a genius at math, so much so that despite being a middle schooler, he gets to take a senior math class with another classmate of his, Claire (played by Piper Wallace).

We quickly see that Prem is starting to get distanced from his best friend at school, Jerome (played by Max Mallas), who wishes to tag along with the gang of cool kids. On the family front, we learn that Prem lost his dad at a very tender age. His mom is bringing him up, Priya (played by Punam Patel), who is doing her best to move on from the personal loss by absolutely refusing to open up about Prem’s dad, Suresh (played by Utkarsh Ambudkar), altogether.

World’s Best (2023) Review — A still from World’s Best (2023)

As Prem coaxes his mother to open up about his dad, he learns he was a local legend as an underground emcee in the hip-hop scene. As Prem tries to fathom the new information by conjuring an apparition of his dad, he must also balance his love for math and his possible (yet unfound) talent for rapping to help him understand his real identity. Will someone so good at math abandon it to pursue hip-hop? Joshi’s film finds the perfect middle ground and puts Asian angst at ease.

More than its coming-of-age narrative, World’s Best (2023) is a film about grappling with the loss of a parent as a child grows up. It may not be immediately apparent, but in Prem’s attempt to trace back his father’s footsteps to his workplace, Leopard’s Lounge, he is actually trying to understand who his father was. This information is crucial for him because his identity is solely based on his mother’s single-minded passion for polishing his math skills.

The ghost apparition of Suresh, who follows Prem around for most of the film and is invisible to others around him, also highlights the dad-shaped hole in the universe that Prem is struggling to fill in with whatever little he knows about him. Joshi’s film, written by Jamie King and Utkarsh Ambudkar, is mindful of this nuance even as they shaped the character of Priya. She is not just a doting ‘mom’ character; she appears to be still grieving about the loss of her husband and Prem’s father. She is trying to deal with it in her way, even if that means listening to a self-help podcast on dealing with loss while working around the house.

My favorite scenes in the movie are when Ambudkar and Magnus’ characters unleash their hip-hop potential to the audience, breaking into raps about everyday life. Magnus is just as magnetic a performer as Ambudkar is in this movie. The musical adds a delicate touch to Joshi’s film, signifying how Prem’s discovery of his talent for rapping starts from his room and then unleashes its full potential in public by the movie’s end. If you like hearty coming-of-age dramas, you should keep a bag of tissues handy for the climax may make you sniffle. World’s Best (2023) focuses on a simple story of a 12-year-old with 12-year-old-like problems and is an immediate mood lifter.