Academic Film Study  ·  Film Studies / Sociology of Media 

Homebound (2025)

A Critical Response to the Academic Film Study Worksheet

Dir. Neeraj Ghaywan  ·  Based on Basharat Peer’s Essay  ·  India’s Oscar Entry 2026  ·  97% on Rotten Tomatoes

This blog post is an academic response to the Film Study Worksheet on Homebound (2025), directed by Neeraj Ghaywan- assigned by Dilip Barad sir. The response addresses all six parts adaptation analysis, narrative and thematic study, character performance, cinematic language, critical ethics, and a final synthesis essay drawing on verified critical sources, production records, and close formal reading of the film.

▶ OFFICIAL TRAILER — Homebound (2025) | Dharma Productions

Source: Dharma Productions released the official trailer on their YouTube channel @DharmaMovies on 17 September 2025 (reported by Bollywood Bubble, Outlook India, India TV News).

PART I  —  Pre-Screening Context & Adaptation

Q.1  —  Source Material Analysis: Fictionalized vs. Real Subjects

Homebound is adapted from Basharat Peer’s deeply reported 2020 New York Times essay, originally titled Taking Amrit Home and later anthologised as A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway. The real subjects of Peer’s reportage were Amrit Kumar, a Dalit man from Bihar, and Mohammad Saiyub, his Muslim friend — both migrant workers employed in the textile mills of Surat, Gujarat. When the COVID-19 lockdown was announced abruptly in March 2020 with four hours’ notice, they lost both their employment and their accommodation overnight and were forced to walk hundreds of kilometres homeward. Saiyub died on that road from exhaustion and hunger.

Ghaywan’s film re-imagines these two men as Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) and Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and makes one decisive alteration: rather than textile workers, they are aspiring police constables. In the scene where both characters board a crowded train to the city, their bags contain examination study materials rather than factory workers’ tools — a visual shorthand for the shift from economic survival to institutional aspiration. This single narrative shift transforms the thematic centre of gravity entirely. In Peer’s essay, the tragedy is fundamentally economic; in the film, it carries the additional, more psychologically specific weight of institutional aspiration crushed by the very state they wished to join.

For Chandan, a Dalit, the police uniform represents escape from caste stigma — a state-granted authority that might override the social hierarchy. For Shoaib, a Muslim, it represents constitutionally-guaranteed proof of belonging. The narrative shift thus creates an acute dramatic irony: these two men who wished to serve and be recognised by the state are abandoned by it at the precise moment of their greatest vulnerability.

Thus, the film demonstrates that the change from textile workers to police aspirants is not a cosmetic revision but a fundamental reorientation: from a story of economic survival to one of dignity denied by the very institutions that promise it.

Q.2  —  Production Context: Martin Scorsese as Executive Producer

Martin Scorsese’s presence as Executive Producer represents a substantive creative mentorship: he watched three different cuts of the film during development and worked closely with Ghaywan on both screenplay and editing. Critics have noted that his influence is visible in the film’s rhythmic restraint in editing, refusal to sentimentalise, and insistence on realism over spectacle. The film was “neither dumbed down nor sanitised for Western audiences” (Adlakha, Variety), which contributed to its standing ovation at Cannes (Un Certain Regard) and strong reception at TIFF 2025.

This quality produced divergent receptions. At Cannes and TIFF — where audiences are accustomed to social realist cinema in the tradition of Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers — the film’s formal restraint read as sophisticated. Domestically, however, the film’s refusal of Bollywood’s melodramatic conventions — the heightened score, the cathartic release, the redemptive arc — appears to have alienated mainstream audiences. The lifetime domestic collection of approximately ₹4.58 crore suggests that the very qualities Scorsese’s mentorship reinforced made the film more legible abroad than at home.

This demonstrates that Scorsese’s mentorship shaped a film that is formally aligned with international art cinema rather than domestic commercial cinema, producing a reception gap that itself reflects the structural inequity in how serious social films are distributed and consumed in India.

▶ Neeraj Ghaywan Interview — Director’s Vision

PART II  —  Narrative Structure & Thematic Study

Q.3  —  The Politics of the “Uniform”

The film’s first half is structured around the logic of competitive aspiration. In the scene where the film opens on both protagonists waiting anxiously by a Police Recruitment Helpline phone, the camera frames them against a bare wall — a visual enclosure that foreshadows their systemic entrapment. They are preparing for an examination in which 2.5 million applicants compete for 3,500 posts — a ratio of one seat per 700 candidates. This statistic is not presented as alarming. It is presented as normal. That normalisation is itself the film’s first act of political argument.

For Chandan and Shoaib, the police uniform is not primarily about power or authority. It is, as a key line of dialogue frames it, about the desire to “stand tall among people who take issue with their very names.” A Dalit’s full name marks his caste; a Muslim’s name marks his faith. The uniform promises to override these codes — to replace the stigmatised self with the uniformed officer of the Republic.

The film deconstructs this belief with quiet ruthlessness. One seat for every 700 applicants is not a meritocracy; it is a lottery dressed in the language of fairness. The system’s sheer inadequacy — its structural incapacity to absorb the aspirations of the millions it educates and then fails to employ — is itself a form of systemic violence. The uniform is a promise the state makes knowing it cannot keep.

Thus, the film shows that the police uniform functions as a site of deferred dignity — a symbol of institutional acceptance that the state weaponises as aspiration while systematically structuring it as unattainable for the overwhelming majority.

Q.4  —  Intersectionality: Caste and Religion

Case A — Chandan and the ‘General’ Category:

In the scene where Chandan fills out his examination form, the film holds briefly on his pen hovering over the category boxes — a small, formally precise moment before he marks ‘General’ rather than ‘Scheduled Caste.’ He is entitled to the reserved category; he voluntarily forfeits it. On the surface, it reads as tactical. Beneath the surface, it is a confession of internalised shame. Chandan fears that applying under the reserved category will mark him even after selection — that his colleagues will treat his presence as a concession rather than an achievement. He would rather compete at a structural disadvantage than carry the stigma of being seen as a “quota beneficiary.”

This moment encapsulates how caste discrimination inflicts damage not only through overt violence but through the way it makes its victims police and diminish themselves. Chandan has so thoroughly absorbed the stigma that he voluntarily forfeits a constitutional protection in order to appear “unmarked.” The tragedy is that the strategy fails — as Variety’s Siddhant Adlakha noted, caste “does not disappear when you choose not to declare it”; it is read off the body, the name, the hesitation.

Case B — The Water Bottle Scene:

In the scene where Shoaib, working as an office peon, offers a water bottle to a colleague, the camera frames the exchange in a medium close-up with no non-diegetic score — only the ambient office sound of keyboards and distant conversation. The colleague’s hand withdraws. His face turns slightly away. There is no dialogue. The entire exchange lasts perhaps three seconds. This is the grammar of micro-aggression: discrimination transmitted not through proclamation but through everyday gesture. The sustained ambient diegetic sound, uninterrupted by any compositional response, refuses to tell the audience how to register the moment — which makes its weight land all the heavier.

The scene reveals that the discrimination is not medieval or rural; it is contemporary and urban, happening in a professional office, likely perpetrated by an educated employee. The logic of untouchability — of the Muslim body as ritually contaminating — persists seamlessly into modern corporate space.

This demonstrates that Homebound stages intersectional discrimination not through explosive confrontation but through formally precise micro-moments, arguing that caste and religious prejudice are ambient and structural rather than exceptional.

Q.5  —  The Pandemic as Narrative Device

Some critics have argued that the COVID-19 lockdown functions as a “convenient twist” — an external catastrophe imported to generate dramatic urgency. This reading underestimates both the film’s structural intelligence and its political argument. In the scene where the lockdown announcement is broadcast — heard by Chandan and Shoaib as a tinny radio voice in their small rented room, surrounded by examination materials that are suddenly worthless — the film does not present a new crisis. It presents the sudden illumination of a crisis that was always already there.

Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” is useful here: gradual, incremental harm inflicted on marginalised communities through structural neglect that is too slow to register as violence. Chandan and Shoaib’s lives before the lockdown are already saturated with slow violence: the impossible examination ratio, the micro-aggressions, the economic tightrope of migrant labour. The lockdown does not introduce violence into their world; it accelerates it to a speed at which the camera can follow.

The film’s tonal shift from a drama of ambition to a survival thriller is therefore not a genre inconsistency but a formal argument: these men were always in danger. The pandemic simply made that danger visible to an audience that might otherwise have been comfortable observing it from a distance.

Thus, the film shows the pandemic not as a narrative convenience but as a structural revelation: the second half’s survival genre does not replace the first half’s drama of aspiration — it completes it, by showing what that aspiration was always being held against.

PART III  —  Character & Performance Analysis

Q.6  —  Somatic Performance: Vishal Jethwa as Chandan

Vishal Jethwa’s performance as Chandan is a masterclass in somatic acting — the use of the body as the primary instrument of psychological communication. In the opening scene where an official asks Chandan his full name, Jethwa communicates an entire social history in a single, microsecond hesitation before he speaks. His shoulders curve inward; his gaze drops fractionally; his voice, when it comes, is pitched slightly lower than his natural register. A tight close-up holds on his face during this beat — the camera refusing to cut away, compelling the viewer to witness what the body is revealing against the character’s will.

For most people, stating one’s name is the most automatic of daily acts. For Chandan, it is a moment of acute social exposure: his surname will disclose his caste, and the disclosure will alter every subsequent interaction. Jethwa’s half-second pause carries the weight of a lifetime’s accumulated vigilance. This is internalised trauma made visible: the body has learned, through years of experience, to anticipate the violence that a name can trigger.

This physical “shrinking” is the dramatic counterpoint to the film’s aspirational premise. Chandan wants a uniform that will allow him to stand tall. His body, throughout the film, tells the story of everything that aspiration is fighting against — and has been losing to.

Thus, the film shows through Jethwa’s somatic performance that the Dalit experience of discrimination is not only externally imposed but has been absorbed into the body itself — producing a form of self-diminishment that operates independently of any specific act of prejudice.

Q.7  —  The “Othered” Citizen: Ishaan Khatter as Shoaib

Shoaib’s character arc begins with a refusal that is also a declaration of faith. In an early scene, his family presses him to take a job offer in Dubai; the scene is staged with the camera at a slight remove, capturing Shoaib’s rejection of the offer within the cramped domestic space of his family home — physically surrounded by the very home he refuses to leave. This decision — to choose India over economic opportunity abroad — is itself an act of patriotic assertion. Shoaib is not the figure of the Muslim who can always leave. He insists on staying, on belonging, on earning his place in the nation he considers his own.

Ishaan Khatter’s portrayal of “simmering angst” captures the specific emotional register of a person perpetually required to prove what they have never been permitted to simply be. In the water bottle scene and others like it, Khatter communicates Shoaib’s response through a held stillness — a quality of suppressed reaction that Variety described as both “immensely endearing and unpredictable.”

This demonstrates that Shoaib’s arc embodies the paradox of the “othered citizen”: the more emphatically he asserts his belonging, the more visibly the social fabric refuses him, making “home” not a geographical fact but a political aspiration that is daily denied.

Q.8  —  Gendered Perspectives: Janhvi Kapoor as Sudha Bharti

The critical debate around Sudha Bharti centres on a genuine dramatic tension within the film. Sudha is introduced as a PhD aspirant in a scene shared with Chandan at what appears to be a college or coaching institute. The framing places them in parallel: two young people from similar socioeconomic backgrounds pursuing different institutional pathways to dignity. In their conversation, Sudha speaks with the measured confidence of a woman who has been permitted to take her own intellectual ambitions seriously — a permission that, the film suggests, was not given to her without struggle but that she has claimed nonetheless. This scene is one of the few in the first half that employs something close to a two-shot of relative equality, the blocking itself communicating a parity of aspiration that the rest of the film will systematically refuse Chandan.

One camp argues Sudha is a narrative device: present to provide emotional context and aspirational counterpoint to the male protagonists, but insufficiently developed to constitute a fully-realised character. As Variety’s Adlakha noted, Kapoor’s role is “truncated to the point of feeling perfunctory” — partly because Kapoor has not yet shed the enunciations that suggest a major-city upbringing, producing an unintended inter-class dynamic.

The counter-argument, however, deserves serious engagement. In the scene where Sudha is seen studying independently while Chandan watches from a distance, the spatial composition communicates an important asymmetry: she occupies the frame’s active centre while he occupies its margin. This visual grammar argues that Sudha’s access to self-directed education is itself a form of social capital unavailable to the male protagonists, regardless of whether her character is fully dramatised. She embodies the fact that educational empowerment is not equally distributed even within marginalised communities; gender, family circumstances, and geography determine who gets to aspire and in which direction.

My own reading is that both positions contain truth. Sudha represents a real and important social phenomenon, but the screenplay does not give Kapoor sufficient scenes to dramatise that phenomenon from the inside. She is conceptually necessary but dramatically underlived.

Thus, the film shows through Sudha’s positioning that educational privilege is itself gendered and classed — a form of dignity accessible through a different pathway than the one the male protagonists pursue, and a pathway that the film’s structural choices ultimately leave underexplored.

▶ Cast Interviews — Ishaan Khatter & Vishal Jethwa on Homebound

PART IV  —  Cinematic Language

Q.9  —  Visual Aesthetics: The “Aesthetic of Exhaustion”

Cinematographer Pratik Shah’s choices in Homebound constitute a sustained argument against the visual grammar of poverty tourism. Indian cinema has a long tradition of filming poverty beautifully: golden hour light on dusty roads, soulful close-ups, wide compositions that transform suffering into picturesque landscape. Shah systematically refuses this vocabulary.

The film’s “warm, grey, and dusty” palette is the flat, exhausted grey of a landscape that offers no relief. During the highway migration sequences, Shah employs low-angle framing that keeps the camera near the ground, focusing on feet, dirt, and sweat rather than on faces reaching skyward. This insistence on the lower body — on the physical mechanism of survival rather than its human countenance — creates what critics have termed an “aesthetic of exhaustion.” In several of these sequences, the camera moves with a slight handheld instability, generating a physical unease in the viewer that mirrors the bodily precarity of the characters.

The framing choices also function to trap the characters visually. Close-ups during the road sequences press the characters against the frame’s edges, compressing rather than liberating. Wide establishing shots of the open road — which might conventionally connote freedom and possibility — are deliberately withheld. In a notable long take during the film’s second half, the camera follows the two men walking in near-silence for an extended, uncut duration: the length of the take forces the audience to experience the monotony and weight of movement in a way that editing would have permitted them to escape. The open road is not a space of freedom for Chandan and Shoaib; it is the surface of their abandonment.

Thus, the film shows through its cinematographic choices — low-angle framing, handheld movement, close-ups of the body’s labour, and long takes of sustained movement — that formal technique is not separate from political argument but is itself a mode of political speech.

Q.10  —  Soundscape: Minimalism vs. Bollywood Melodrama

The background score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor operates on a principle of strategic withholding. Where conventional Bollywood melodrama deploys non-diegetic music to instruct the audience — swelling strings that signal grief, percussive climaxes that signal danger — Homebound’s score largely refuses to issue such instructions.

The most powerful deployment of this approach is the privileging of diegetic sound over composed music. In the water bottle scene, what we hear is not a musical underscoring of Shoaib’s humiliation but the ambient office sound that was present before the interaction began and continues after it ends — indifferent, unchanged. In the highway migration sequences, the diegetic soundscape of feet on asphalt, distant lorries, wind, and laboured breathing carries the film’s tragedy more honestly than any composed score could: the suffering is located in the material world, not aestheticised into sentiment. In contrast to Bollywood films such as Kabir Singh or Student of the Year where non-diegetic score operates as a constant emotional guide, Homebound’s minimalism places the audience in the position of a witness rather than a consumer of curated emotion.

This demonstrates that the film’s choice to foreground diegetic sound over non-diegetic score is not merely a stylistic preference but an ethical one: it refuses to aestheticise suffering, insisting that the audience encounter it without the mediating comfort of melodrama.

PART V  —  Critical Discourse & Ethics

Q.11  —  The Censorship Debate: CBFC’s 11 Cuts

The CBFC ordered 11 modifications totalling 77 seconds — including the muting of the word “Gyan” (knowledge/wisdom) and the removal of the dialogue “aloo gobhi khaate hai” (they eat cauliflower and potatoes). A visual of a man performing puja was also censored, and 32 seconds were deleted from a cricket match scene at 1 hour and 4 minutes. At first glance, these cuts appear comically obscure. What ideological threat could a reference to cauliflower and potatoes possibly pose?

The answer lies in specificity itself. The “aloo gobhi” dialogue is a food community marker — a detail that encodes religious and class identity in a single, everyday phrase. Specificity, in the context of films about caste and religious discrimination, is precisely what the state apparatus finds most threatening, because it grounds discrimination in the recognisable texture of ordinary life rather than in abstract social commentary. The CBFC’s cuts thus reflect state anxiety about social fissures being made visible through the particular rather than the general.

Ishaan Khatter’s public statement about “double standards” is pertinent: commercial entertainers with morally questionable content pass through certification without similar scrutiny. This reveals the CBFC’s function not as a neutral arbiter of public morality but as a mechanism of political management: films that disturb are managed; films that distract are accommodated.

Thus, the film demonstrates through its censorship history that the state’s anxiety about Homebound was not incidental but structural: the very specificity that makes the film politically effective is what makes it politically threatening to the institutions it critiques.

Q.12  —  Ethics of “True Story” Adaptations

Homebound’s ethical landscape is complicated by two simultaneous controversies. Author Puja Changoiwala filed a plagiarism suit in December 2025 claiming the film unlawfully copies her 2021 novel Homebound, alleging that the filmmakers “blatantly reproduced substantial portions” including scenes, dialogue, and narrative structure. Separately, the family of the real Amrit Kumar — the man whose death inspired Peer’s essay — stated that they were given only ₹10,000 initially, were not consulted during production, and were unaware of the film’s release date. Dharma Productions called the plagiarism claims “baseless and unfounded,” but the family’s situation raises questions that cannot be so easily dismissed (Ajay, Asianet Newsable, 2 October 2025).

The ethical question at stake is not simply whether the filmmakers followed legal procedure. It is whether they fulfilled the moral obligations that attach to adapting the lived experience of marginalised people. When a filmmaker takes the death of a migrant worker as raw material for an award-winning, internationally acclaimed film that generates significant cultural capital — even if not box office revenue — and the family of that worker is excluded from the process, the film’s claims to social consciousness become morally unstable.

“Raising awareness” is frequently cited as the justification for such adaptations. But awareness raised on the backs of people who neither consented to nor benefited from the raising is a form of extractive storytelling: the suffering of the marginalised becomes a resource for the prestige economy of art cinema. Ghaywan’s film is formally and politically serious — but seriousness of intention does not exempt filmmakers from the obligation to stand by the actual lives they bring to screen.

This demonstrates that the ethical responsibilities of “true story” filmmaking extend beyond legal rights clearance to include the active inclusion, consultation, and fair compensation of the real-life subjects whose tragedies provide the film’s moral authority.

Q.13  —  Commercial Viability vs. Art

Homebound received a standing ovation at Cannes, a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and was India’s official Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film. Its lifetime domestic box office collection was approximately ₹4.58 crore — a significant commercial failure by any measure. Producer Karan Johar’s statement that he “might not make unprofitable films like Homebound again” due to business mandates is as honest as it is troubling.

The divergence illuminates a structural problem in the post-pandemic Indian film market. The collapse of middle-tier cinema has left films like Homebound without reliable distribution infrastructure. Reports suggest the film was given inadequate screen counts, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: low visibility produces low awareness, which confirms the studio’s initial hesitancy. However, the film’s social media response after it arrived on Netflix (from November 21, 2025) was substantial — demonstrating that the audience for serious social cinema exists, but has been trained by multiplex infrastructure to encounter such films on streaming platforms rather than in theatres.

Thus, the film’s commercial trajectory shows that critical prestige and domestic commercial viability operate on entirely separate axes in contemporary Indian cinema, and that without structural changes to distribution and marketing, socially serious films will continue to be critically acclaimed and commercially invisible.

Visual Summary  —  Key Scenes, Themes & Techniques

This infographic summarises the key scenes, themes, cinematic techniques, and character arcs analysed throughout this response. Upload the homebound_analysis_infographic.svg file to your Blogger post here.

HOMEBOUND (2025) — DIR. NEERAJ GHAYWAN

Key Scenes  ·  Themes  ·  Cinematic Techniques  ·  Character Arcs

KEY SCENES & WHAT THEY REVEAL

Scene 1 — Name Disclosure Tight close-up holds on Chandan’s face during a microsecond pause before stating his caste-marked surname. Somatic acting + no non-diegetic sound. Reveals: Internalised caste trauma

Scene 2 — Water Bottle Medium close-up; colleague withdraws hand. Only diegetic ambient office sound. No score — silence as formal argument against melodrama. Reveals: Religious micro-aggression

Scene 3 — Highway Migration Low-angle framing, handheld movement, long takes of walking. Feet, dirt, sweat. Warm-grey palette. Reveals: Slow violence as form

CENTRAL THEMES

Dignity as RightNot a reward; denied by systemic apathy

The UniformPromise the state cannot keep

IntersectionalityCaste + religion + gender + class

Slow ViolencePandemic reveals pre-existing harm

BelongingHome as political aspiration

CHARACTER ARC SUMMARY

CHANDAN (Vishal Jethwa) Dalit. Applies under General category. Body shrinks in authority scenes. Somatic acting communicates internalised shame. Shame → Hidden identity → Survival

SHOAIB (Ishaan Khatter) Muslim. Refuses Dubai job; asserts Indian identity. Water bottle scene; simmering angst. Patriotic assertion met with daily othering. Assertion → Othering → Abandonment

SUDHA (Janhvi Kapoor) PhD aspirant. Tentative romance with Chandan. Educational empowerment symbol. Debate: narrative device or necessary counterpoint? Privilege → Parallel aspiration → Underwritten

PART VI  —  Final Synthesis Essay (~1000 words)

Essay Prompt: “Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound suggests that dignity is not a reward, but a basic right denied by systemic apathy. Analyze this statement by exploring the film’s treatment of the ‘Journey Home’ — not just as a physical migration during the lockdown, but as a metaphor for the protagonists’ failed attempt to find acceptance in the social fabric of India.”

Dignity Denied: The Journey Home as Metaphor in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound

In Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025), the “Journey Home” is never only a journey. It is a trial, an interrogation of belonging, and a slow demonstration that the social fabric of modern India has been woven to exclude the very people who built it. Chandan, a Dalit man from Bihar, and Shoaib, his Muslim friend, do not set out on the road during the COVID-19 lockdown because they choose to. They set out because every institution that was supposed to protect them — the state, the market, the social contract of the Republic — has, at the precise moment of their greatest need, turned its back. The physical journey home is thus inseparable from the metaphorical one: an attempt to find, at the end of a very long road, a place where their lives matter. The film’s tragedy, enacted with formal restraint and emotional precision, is that no such place awaits them.

Ghaywan establishes the film’s central argument in its first half through the logic of aspiration. In the scene where both protagonists wait anxiously by a Police Recruitment Helpline telephone, the camera frames them against a bare wall — a visual enclosure that already prefigures their systemic entrapment. The uniform they seek is not merely a garment; it is an instrument of social transformation. As a key line of dialogue frames it, the uniform promises to “stand tall among people who take issue with their very names.” A Dalit surname discloses caste lineage; a Muslim name marks religious community. The uniform, in Chandan and Shoaib’s imagining, would replace the stigmatised identity with the authority of state service. Dignity, in this reading, is the aspiration: something to be earned through examination and institutional membership, a reward for meritocratic success.

The film systematically dismantles this aspiration. The near-impossible ratio — 2.5 million candidates, 3,500 posts — is not presented as a scandal but as a fact of life, and that normalisation is itself the film’s first formal act of political analysis. No individual talent or effort can meaningfully alter odds of this magnitude. The system that promises dignity through institutional achievement is a system that structurally guarantees that the overwhelming majority of those who try will not achieve it.

The micro-aggressions that Chandan and Shoaib navigate demonstrate that the denial of dignity is not contingent on examination failure; it is constant and ambient. In the scene where Chandan fills out his examination form and marks ‘General’ rather than his entitled ‘Scheduled Caste’ category, the close-up on his hovering pen communicates internalised shame so thoroughly absorbed that he voluntarily forfeits a constitutional protection to avoid being marked. Vishal Jethwa’s somatic performance throughout — the physical “shrinking” in the presence of authority, the microsecond hesitation before stating his full name, captured in an unbroken close-up — translates this internalised trauma into bodily language. Dignity is not merely denied from outside; it is also dismantled from within.

Shoaib’s trajectory explores a parallel dimension. In the scene where his family presses him to take the Dubai offer, the handheld camera captures his refusal within the cramped domestic space he insists on inhabiting — physically and formally asserting his belonging even as the scene’s composition communicates the pressure against him. The water bottle scene, with its medium close-up and unbroken diegetic sound, offers the most economical statement of what that insistence costs: the hand that withdraws is the hand of the nation he refuses to leave, and it is withdrawing from his.

One might argue, as some critics have, that the film’s relentless focus on systemic failure produces a pessimism so total that it forecloses the possibility of political imagination — that by refusing catharsis or redemption, Ghaywan risks leaving his audience devastated rather than mobilised. This is a legitimate formal challenge. However, the film addresses it precisely through the emphasis it places on the friendship between Chandan and Shoaib. Their bond — most evident in the long takes that allow their companionship to exist in real time, uncondensed and unreduced by editing — represents a form of dignity that the state cannot grant or withdraw. It is self-generated, mutual, and therefore the only form of dignity in the film that proves structurally secure. The tragedy is not that this is worthless; it is that it is insufficient.

The COVID-19 lockdown, announced with four hours’ notice, functions not as an external catastrophe but as the sudden illumination of one that was already underway. Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” is indispensable here: the structural violence of caste discrimination, religious othering, and economic precarity had been accumulating in Chandan and Shoaib’s lives long before the pandemic. The lockdown simply accelerates it to a speed at which the camera — and an audience previously insulated from its effects — can follow. In the scene where the lockdown announcement is heard as a radio voice in their small rented room, surrounded by now-worthless examination materials, the low-angle framing that follows them out of the room and onto the road begins its sustained argument: they were always in danger. The pandemic simply took away the furniture that allowed everyone else to pretend otherwise.

Cinematographer Pratik Shah’s visual grammar during the highway migration sequences reinforces this argument at every frame. The low-angle framing stays near the ground — feet, dirt, sweat. The handheld instability generates a physical unease that mirrors the characters’ bodily precarity. The long takes of sustained walking force the audience to inhabit the journey’s weight without the release of editing. The diegetic soundscape of road noise and laboured breathing refuses the mediation of a composed score. Each of these formal choices is simultaneously an aesthetic decision and a political one: the film refuses to aestheticise the suffering it documents.

The “Journey Home” is ultimately a journey toward a home that cannot shelter them, undertaken by men whom the social contract has already failed. Critics have noted that the film “refuses to offer false hope or redemption,” insisting instead that “equality appears only in conditions where everyone is equally abandoned.” This is the film’s most bitter irony and its most honest political insight: stripped of all the instruments of social differentiation on the lockdown road, Chandan and Shoaib are treated equally by the state. They are equally invisible. Equally without recourse. Equally abandoned.

Homebound does not argue that Chandan and Shoaib’s failure to find acceptance is a personal failure. It argues, with structural rigour and formal precision, that it is a systemic one. The social fabric has been woven, over centuries of caste hierarchy and decades of inadequate reform, to exclude exactly these two men. Their aspiration was genuine, their effort real, their right to dignity inalienable. The film’s tragedy is not that they were unlucky. It is that the system was working exactly as it was designed to. Dignity, Homebound insists, is not a reward to be conferred on those who succeed within a rigged system. It is a right — and its denial is not an accident but a policy.

References

Primary Source

Homebound. Directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, performances by Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, and Janhvi Kapoor, Dharma Productions / Netflix, 2025.

Secondary Sources

Adlakha, Siddhant. “Homebound Review: Friendship Drama Set in Politically Fractured India.” Variety, 24 Sept. 2025. variety.com

Ajay, UK. “‘Stand by the Lives You Bring to Screen’: Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound Draws Flak for Ignoring Family.” Asianet Newsable, 2 Oct. 2025.

Bhattacharya, T. “Oscar-Hopeful Homebound Faces Copyright Suit.” Mint, 24 Dec. 2025.

Felperin, L. “Homebound Review — Emotionally Rich Study of Friends in Rural India.” The Guardian, 24 Sept. 2025.

Festival de Cannes. “Homebound.” festival-cannes.com, 2025. festival-cannes.com/en/f/homebound

Jha, S. “Karan Johar Won’t Make ‘Unprofitable’ Homebound Again.” International Business Times India, 10 Oct. 2025.

Keshri, S. “Exclusive: Vishal Jethwa Talks Homebound, Oscar Shortlist.” India Today, 29 Dec. 2025.

Menon, R. “Homebound Review: A Journey of Friendship, Identity, and a Nation That Keeps Failing Its Own.” Script Magazine, 24 Nov. 2025.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Peer, Basharat. “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway.” The New York Times, 2020.

Pokharel, S. “Homebound Is Hindi Cinema at Its Bravest.” The Kathmandu Post, 10 Dec. 2025.

Rotten Tomatoes. “Homebound (2025).” rottentomatoes.com

Singh, N. “Homebound: Hits Home, Oscar or Not, It’s a Winner.” The Tribune, 27 Sept. 2025.