Homebound (2025)

This blog post has been prepared as part of a film-screening assignment given by Prof. Dilip Barad on Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound.

For further insights, tap here.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound presents a sharp critique of India’s migrant crisis during the COVID-19 lockdown. The film shows the journey of migrants as a source of deep suffering, intensified by the state’s absence and apathy. Through this disturbing portrayal, it forces audiences to face a harsh truth that can no longer be overlooked.

PART I: PRE-SCREENING CONTEXT & ADAPTATION

1. Source Material Analysis

The adaptation of Basharat Peer’s journalistic essay into Homebound is not merely a shift from factual writing to fictional cinema; it signals a conscious change in the narrative’s political focus. In Peer’s account, Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub are migrant textile workers who symbolize the millions employed in India’s informal sector, and their suffering is framed within broader conditions of economic precarity and persistent state neglect.

By transforming these characters into police aspirants, the film relocates the narrative from struggles of basic survival to the sphere of civic ambition. This change heightens both the emotional and political resonance of the story. Chandan and Shoaib are no longer depicted as outsiders abandoned by state structures; instead, they are individuals who believe in those very institutions. The police uniform becomes a marker of dignity, power, and hope—an emblem of the belief that institutional membership can overcome caste and religious barriers. In this way, the film widens its critique, revealing how even the dream of upward mobility is inseparable from exploitative systems.

2. Production Context: Scorsese’s Mentorship 

Martin Scorsese’s mentorship is visible less in stylistic mimicry and more in ethical realism. The film avoids spectacle, sentimentality, and narrative catharsis—hallmarks of mainstream Indian cinema. Instead, it adopts a restrained observational gaze, reminiscent of neo-realist traditions.

This realism enables Homebound to travel well internationally because it refuses cultural translation for Western comfort. The film neither explains caste nor simplifies religious marginalization. Ironically, this very authenticity alienates sections of the domestic audience accustomed to narrative closure. Thus, Scorsese’s influence positions Homebound within a global realist cinema tradition, while exposing the fracture between global critical acclaim and local commercial reception.

PART II: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE & THEMATIC STUDY

3. The Politics of the Uniform 

The police uniform functions as a deceptive symbol of neutrality. For Chandan and Shoaib, it represents the hope of an identity free from caste or religious associations. Yet the film gradually dismantles this belief. The staggering figure of 2.5 million candidates vying for only 3,500 posts exposes the notion of meritocracy as almost entirely unreal.

More importantly, Homebound suggests that even securing the uniform would not guarantee true dignity or respect. It may grant a certain presence within the system, but not actual equality. Thus, the film presents the uniform as a form of aspirational violence—enticing marginalized people to invest in a system that is inherently structured to keep them excluded.

4. Intersectionality: Caste and Religion 

Case A: Chandan and Caste Shame

Chandan’s decision to apply through the ‘General’ category demonstrates what sociologists describe as internalized caste oppression. His concern is not about losing legal benefits but about being socially identified. In this mindset, reservation is framed as a sign of personal inadequacy, showing how neoliberal ideology turns systemic inequality into an individual’s supposed shortcoming.

Case B: Shoaib and Quiet Cruelty

The water bottle moment is heartbreaking exactly because it involves no open conflict. It reflects routine communal bias, made to appear polite. The denial is justified through excuses of cleanliness or unease, hiding discrimination under courteous behavior. In this way, the film shows that contemporary prejudice often works not through overt aggression, but through subtle, ritualized forms of exclusion.

5. Pandemic as Narrative Device

The lockdown doesn’t disrupt the film’s narrative structure; rather, it exposes it more directly. What appears to be a genre shift is actually the same underlying system continuing. The pandemic doesn’t create new hardships but amplifies the ones that were already present.

By using the pace and tension of a survival thriller, the film highlights a harsh truth: for marginalized groups, life is already experienced as a constant state of crisis. COVID-19 simply removes the thin layer of normality that concealed this. Thus, Homebound reframes the pandemic not as an isolated catastrophe, but as a force that speeds up the slow, everyday violence embedded within routine existence.

PART III: CHARACTER & PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

6. Vishal Jethwa’s Somatic Performance

Vishal Jethwa’s acting is marked by a slow tightening of the body, turning his performance into a study of how social oppression is physically absorbed. His posture suggests that he anticipates humiliation even before it happens, reflecting a learned obedience rooted in generations of caste-based trauma. This burden is expressed not through words but through the subtlety of his movements and restraint.

The brief hesitation before he states his full name perfectly captures this reality: even self-identification becomes dangerous. What society refuses to acknowledge, the body continues to remember. Through this finely tuned physicality, his performance becomes a living repository of history—memory embedded directly in the body.

7. Ishaan Khatter and the “Othered” Citizen

Shoaib’s storyline exposes the core tension surrounding Muslim citizenship in India. His choice not to move to Dubai is a refusal of forced economic migration, yet staying in India brings him not acceptance but suspicion and constant questioning.

His anger remains tightly controlled rather than explosive, underscoring the film’s understanding that minority expressions of frustration are continually watched, restrained, and punished. Shoaib’s pain arises from his deep loyalty to a nation that offers no equal loyalty in return. Here, “home” is not a guaranteed entitlement but a fragile status—one that must be repeatedly justified, protected, and re-earned.

Gendered Perspectives: Sudha Bharti (Janhvi Kapoor)

Sudha Bharti’s character brings a quiet imbalance to the film’s narrative structure. Though Janhvi Kapoor delivers a subtle and controlled performance, Sudha functions less as a fully developed character and more as a narrative instrument. She mainly serves as an observer and moral center, representing the educational opportunities and social privilege that Chandan and Shoaib do not possess.

Her inability to meaningfully alter events highlights one of the film’s key ironies: even education and cultural privilege become ineffective in the face of systemic collapse and widespread humanitarian neglect. Through Sudha, the film suggests that personal advantages provide neither real protection nor meaningful agency within a context shaped by institutional dysfunction.

PART IV: CINEMATIC LANGUAGE

9. Visual Aesthetics: The Aesthetic of Exhaustion

Through its persistent attention to feet, dust, and sweat, the film rejects any impulse toward heroic or monumental imagery. Migration is stripped of spectacle and rendered instead as physical attrition. The emphasis on ground-level framing erases aesthetic distance, compelling the viewer to encounter exhaustion as an immediate, embodied experience rather than a visual trope.

This visual strategy actively resists voyeurism. Instead of offering cinematic pleasure, it produces ethical unease, positioning the spectator not as a detached observer but as a witness implicated in the suffering onscreen.

10. Soundscape: Resisting Melodramatic Excess

The background score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor consciously resists overt emotional cueing. Rather than employing sentimental melodies or dramatic crescendos, the film relies on a restrained, ambient, and often industrial soundscape. This deliberate minimalism refuses to mediate the viewer’s emotions, forcing the audience to face the bleakness of the situation without the relief of musical consolation.

Silence, in this context, becomes an expressive force. It deepens the sense of tragedy, as the sparse auditory environment echoes the apathy of both the endless highway and the absent state. Within this near-vacuum, the sounds of breathing, footsteps, and physical strain gain heightened significance, amplifying the film’s atmosphere of isolation and abandonment.

PART V: CRITICAL DISCOURSE & ETHICS

11. Censorship and State Anxiety 

Silencing harmless words shows that censorship operates as a form of symbolic domination, not simply as the regulation of content. Ordinary elements like food and language turn political because they represent daily forms of shared living.

What unsettles the state is not open criticism, but the act of giving routine visibility to marginalized voices. Social realism becomes threatening because it makes systemic injustice look ordinary and widespread.

12. Ethics of Adaptation

This aspect of the film introduces its most complex ethical concerns. The plagiarism accusations made by Puja Changoiwala, along with claims that Amrit Kumar’s family received little or no compensation, deeply undermine the film’s moral credibility. These issues force us to confront a crucial question: can a film that condemns capitalist exploitation do so honestly if its own creative process relies on similarly extractive practices?

Appeals to “creating awareness” often serve to protect artistic motives. But when the real individuals whose suffering forms the basis of the story gain nothing materially—while the film collects awards, recognition, and profit—the compassion it evokes risks becoming purely symbolic. In such circumstances, representation itself may end up reproducing the same exploitative systems that the film seeks to criticize.

13. Commercial Viability vs Art 

Homebound’s lack of success highlights a post-pandemic collapse in audience attention. Meaningful, issue-driven cinema now struggles against algorithm-driven content and pure escapism.

Its reception reveals an industry that prioritizes distraction rather than challenging narratives, prompting critical concerns about the survival of socially conscious filmmaking.

Conclusion

Homebound suggests that in today’s India, dignity is worn down not by direct violence but by continuous neglect. The journey home offers no promise of return or safety; instead, it reveals that “home” is structurally inhospitable to those who live at the margins.

The film denies viewers any sense of redemption—not because it is pessimistic, but because such closure is rarely available to the oppressed in real life. By refusing emotional resolution, Homebound reshapes the purpose of cinema: it becomes an act of witnessing rather than comforting. In withholding consolation, the film emphasizes that to watch, to remember, and to remain uneasy are ethical duties placed upon the audience.