Film Screening: Homebound (2025)
Introduction
The screening of Homebound as part of the Department of English’s film study programme was not simply a viewing exercise it required moral, social, and political reflection. Directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, the film presents a quiet yet deeply unsettling portrayal of ambition, self-worth, and structural neglect in present-day India. Instead of magnifying suffering through dramatic spectacle, the narrative relies on pauses, silence, and physical fatigue. In doing so, it compels the audience to recognize how marginalized individuals must struggle to claim something that should already belong to them: dignity.
From Reportage to Aspiration: Transforming the Source Material
Homebound draws inspiration from Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times essay, A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway, which recounts the real experiences of migrant textile workers Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In the cinematic adaptation, these real-life figures are reimagined as Chandan and Shoaib, and their identities are significantly reshaped. Rather than portraying them as migrant labourers from the outset, the film presents them as hopeful police constable recruits. This alteration is meaningful. While the original essay emphasizes economic hardship and governmental neglect, the film reorients the narrative toward the quest for institutional respect. Chandan and Shoaib seek more than survival; they desire validation, official recognition, and the authority associated with state power.
This change intensifies the emotional impact. Their aspiration to become part of the system makes their abandonment even more tragic. Consequently, the adaptation shifts from simple documentation to a sharper critique—highlighting not only vulnerability but also the harsh reality of promises that remain unfulfilled.
Production Context and Global Realism
The film’s realist style is influenced in part by Martin Scorsese, who participated as Executive Producer and offered guidance during the scripting and editing phases. His presence can be felt in the film’s measured pacing, moral subtlety, and deliberate avoidance of melodrama.
This understated realism brought the film recognition at international platforms such as the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, spaces that often celebrate nuanced social narratives. Yet this same restraint created distance from sections of the domestic audience more accustomed to heightened emotion and star-centered storytelling. The response to the film therefore reveals a tension between global art-house sensibilities and mainstream Indian cinematic preferences.
The Politics of the Uniform
In the opening half of the film, the police uniform emerges as a potent emblem of upward mobility. For Chandan and Shoaib individuals marked by caste and religious identity the uniform symbolizes freedom from prejudice, unquestioned authority, and socially sanctioned dignity.
However, this belief in meritocratic fairness disintegrates when confronted with the stark reality: 2.5 million candidates competing for only 3,500 vacancies. Such disproportion exposes the myth of equal opportunity. Hard work alone cannot overcome structural imbalance. What once represented hope gradually transforms into an unattainable dream, illustrating how institutions encourage ambition while simultaneously restricting access.
Intersectionality: Subtle Forms of Violence
Rather than depicting explicit physical oppression, Homebound portrays discrimination through everyday humiliations and quiet exclusions. These subtle acts microaggressions rooted in caste and religion accumulate to reveal how systemic injustice operates not only through visible brutality but also through normalized, routine interactions.
Caste
Chandan chooses to apply under the General category rather than the Reserved category, even though he belongs to a Dalit community. This decision reflects deeply internalised caste stigma. Although reservation policies are designed as a form of corrective justice, they are often socially devalued and treated as signs of inferiority. As a result, Chandan attempts to suppress his caste identity in order to claim respectability. The film therefore illustrates how caste oppression functions not only through institutional structures but also through psychological conditioning, shaping how individuals see themselves.
Religion
In a deeply unsettling office sequence, Shoaib experiences discrimination when a colleague refuses to drink water he has touched. The scene contains no overt argument or dramatic confrontation only an uncomfortable silence. This restraint intensifies the impact. The exclusion is subtle yet cutting, representing a form of everyday cruelty that operates without spectacle. By avoiding melodrama, the film highlights how normalized prejudice can inflict profound humiliation.
The Pandemic as Revelation, Not Interruption
The onset of the COVID-19 lockdown shifts the film’s tone from a narrative of aspiration to one of survival. While some critics interpret this transition as sudden, the film implies that the pandemic does not introduce a new crisis but instead exposes an existing one.
The lockdown amplifies ongoing “slow violence” embedded in social structures. The absence of transportation, food security, and institutional assistance lays bare the state’s neglect. As Chandan and Shoaib undertake their difficult journey home, their physical displacement parallels the breakdown of their faith in institutions. The promise of citizenship gives way to mere survival, and the idea of equality survives only in the shared experience of abandonment.
Embodied Performances and Conditional Citizenship
Vishal Jethwa’s performance as Chandan is deeply somatic. His lowered gaze, hunched shoulders, and hesitant speech visually register internalized caste trauma. When asked his full name, his body retreats enacting centuries of imposed shame without explicit dialogue.
Ishaan Khatter’s Shoaib embodies restrained anger. His rejection of a Dubai job in favor of a government post in India reflects a desire for belonging at home. Yet the film repeatedly shows how minorities must prove loyalty to earn acceptance. Home becomes a space of emotional risk, not safety.
Janhvi Kapoor’s Sudha Bharti, though often critiqued as underdeveloped, represents educational privilege. Her relative empowerment highlights how class and education mediate dignity more effectively than aspiration alone serving as a counterpoint rather than a parallel arc.
Cinematic Language: Exhaustion as Aesthetic
Cinematographer Pratik Shah employs a muted palette of greys and dust tones. Migration sequences focus on feet, sweat, and cracked roads, denying panoramic beauty. These ground-level close-ups produce an aesthetic of exhaustion, immersing viewers in bodily fatigue rather than visual pleasure.
The minimalist score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor resists emotional manipulation. Silence dominates moments of grief, allowing ambient sounds to carry affect. Tragedy remains unresolved, deeply personal, and unsettling.
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Censorship, Ethics, and Market Hostility
The Central Board of Film Certification ordered 11 cuts, including muting everyday words and removing brief visuals. These changes reflect ideological anxiety rather than moral concern. Ishaan Khatter’s criticism of “double standards” exposes how socially conscious cinema faces harsher scrutiny than escapist entertainment.
Ethical concerns further complicate the film’s reception. Allegations of plagiarism and the marginalization of Amrit Kumar’s family raise questions about artistic appropriation. Can awareness justify exclusion? Ethical filmmaking demands accountability to lived realities, not just representational intent.
Despite international acclaim, Homebound failed commercially due to limited screens and weak distribution. Karan Johar’s remarks about avoiding “unprofitable” films expose the market’s hostility toward serious cinema in post-pandemic India.
Personal Reflection
While viewing Homebound, I became aware of the film’s intentional avoidance of certain pandemic realities such as misinformation, government broadcasts, and religious practices that influenced daily life during the lockdown. By excluding media commentary, political rhetoric, and faith-based coping strategies, the narrative confines itself to the protagonists’ lived experience.
This selective focus deepens the emotional closeness between the audience and the characters, yet it also reduces the broader sociopolitical canvas. The story shifts away from examining the nation’s collective reaction and centers instead on intimate experiences of neglect. Whether this artistic restraint represents ethical precision or a significant omission is open to interpretation.
Conclusion: Dignity as a Withheld Right
Ultimately, Homebound contends that dignity should not be treated as a prize granted for compliance or ambition; it is a fundamental right that is repeatedly withheld. The motif of the “journey home” operates on two levels both as a literal act of migration and as a symbolic moral passage. Neither the state nor the native village provides true sanctuary.
The film deliberately avoids offering emotional resolution. Rather than catharsis, it leaves the audience confronting an unsettling reality: within a social order shaped by caste hierarchy, religious bias, and institutional indifference, the only form of equality that remains is the equality of shared abandonment.
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