Ten gunmen arrive by boat in Mumbai on the night of November 26, 2008, and over the next sixty hours attack the city's main railway station, two luxury hotels, and a Jewish center. The film reconstructs the siege largely through intercepted phone calls between the attackers and their handlers in Pakistan, recordings in which the handlers coach the young gunmen by phone, telling them where to shoot and reminding them of the reward waiting in paradise. CCTV footage from the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway terminus and the Taj and Oberoi hotels tracks the gunmen room by room, while survivors, hotel staff, and police officers describe what happened just outside the camera's frame. Captured attacker Ajmal Kasab appears in interrogation footage, giving the operation a face and a voice. Dan Reed's film builds almost entirely from primary material rather than reenactment, and the wiretapped conversations are the reason it lands as hard as it does. The result is less a summary of the attacks than a minute-by-minute record of how they were carried out and directed from a distance.