Does cinema have the power to change? The jury is (perennially) out on that one. Homebound comes close, very close, to providing the answer. For me, the experience of watching this film felt like my heart had been wrenched out of my body, dessicated into a million pieces and put back again. I am still me, but the experience of Homebound makes me feel I am not the same.
While that may seem like an exaggeration to many (it isn’t, trust me), Homebound is anything but exaggerated. India’s official entry to the 2026 Academy Awards is a touching, telling and timely zeitgeist of the tumultuous times we live in. A time in our history as a nation where othering is rampant, knee-jerk outrage is just a frothing-at-the-mouth social media post away and empathy has all but evaporated from our emotional consciousness.
And yet Homebound is a story of hope even in the middle of hopelessness. Director Neeraj Ghaywan — the man who, a decade ago, directed the globally-acclaimed Masaan on debut — once again gives us the story of a hidebound society severely clamping down on personal freedom, and more importantly, on the right to dream of and realise a life of dignity.
Dignity, however, is not something that Mohammed Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa) have known much of. Ghaywan’s inspiration for Homebound is Basharat Peer’s New York Times op-ed piece ‘A Friendship, A Pandemic and a Death Beside The Highway’. Written in July 2020, it is a stirring photograph of two young men in the middle of the migrant crisis brought on by the Covid-19 lockdown, that spurred the piece, described by Peer in the sub-headline as: ‘How a photograph of a young man cradling his dying friend sent me on a journey across India’. The picture was that of Mohammad Saiyub, a Muslim man sitting despondent by the highway, as his close friend Amrit Kumar, a Dalit, collapsed on account of dehydration, tiredness and, ultimately, life. The two were navigating a journey of a few hundred kilometres on foot, like many other migrants at that time, to get from Surat, where they worked, to their homes. Amrit didn’t make it, Saiyub did. But his life was never the same again.
Ghaywan takes the seed of that story, but his approach to it is not reductive. A filmmaker with a worldview and a lived-in experience lesser than the Masaan maker would have perhaps made Homebound a story of just the final hour, documenting the tortuous travails of two men struggling to get home. But Ghaywan invests much more in his protagonists, deeply enriching the film with the equally treacherous backstory of how they got there.
For even without this journey, life is not easy for Shoaib and Chandan. It never is, especially if you happen to be a marginalised minority in this country. When we first meet Chandan and Shoaib, the two are running to catch the train which will take them to the centre of a police recruitment exam. The two boys — best friends since childhood — believe that is the only way in which they can obliterate the dark shadow of caste and religion that determines their identity wherever they go. As Shoaib says: “Badan pe vardi padti hain toh seeney pe likha naam koi nahi padhta.” A simple line — Varun Grover and Shreedhar Dubey deliver many a poignant and powerful cracker in Homebound — sums up what drives the two.
It is here that they meet Sudha Bharti (Janhvi Kapoor), a fellow aspirant. Through the interactions between the trio — especially those between Chandan and Sudha — Ghaywan subtly but succinctly illustrates how chasms exist, unknowingly, even within the underprivileged. She is a proud Ambedkar follower, who wants to “take the fight ahead”. Sudha is a Dalit too, but Chandan doesn’t have the privileges that she — the daughter of a government employee who can afford to send his daughter to college — has. She wants to fight the good fight that the generations before her have paved the way for. He, too, has a picture of Ambedkar on the walls of his increasingly decrepit home, but Chandan has a family to feed. Hiding his identity often helps him, but sets him off on a guilt trip. For Shoaib, the fight is equally tough, if not more. “Wahan pe koi aapko nahin poochhega ki aap aloo gobhi bhi halal karke khaate hain kya?” a well-meaning fellow Muslim tells Shoaib when he resists going to Dubai for a job.
Ghaywan, through daily instances, depicts the systemic bias that Shoaib and Chandan go through — sometimes direct, as in a government office; sometimes wrapped in purported humour like a drunken banter between colleagues. Forced by circumstances, their friendship gets fractured in between, but the two eventually find themselves, once again, on the same side of pride and prejudice. It is to the credit of Homebound’s filmmaking that none of what we see — however difficult — feels didactic or documentary-like.
In the middle of much frustration and a future that increasingly looks fickle, it is the friendship between the two that keeps their hopes alive. The chemistry and camaraderie between Ishaan and Vishal is lived-in and real, their presence — both individually and collectively — never feeling performative. There is not a false note in what the two bring to the screen, with so many scenes — the jubilation of a cricket match won, the conversations about life and love by their daily haunt, the habit of looking out for each other in every circumstance — imbuing the film with both heart and heft. The penultimate moments of Homebound, which tests them both as humans and friends, is what make it the film it is.
Janhvi has a brief role, but as an actor improving with every film, she brings a sense of calm in the middle of the chaos that our protagonists often find themselves in. The rest of the lesser-known cast is beautifully effective in their roles, with a special mention for Shalini Vatsa as Chandan’s mother, whose cracked heels not only become the film’s symbol of struggle but also give us one of its most heart-rending moments — one in which an elusive pair of sandals is gifted to her.
In its run-up to being India’s selection for the Oscars, Homebound — backed by a producer as strong and far-reaching as Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions — has created waves at prestigious film festivals like Cannes and Toronto, with no less than the legendary Martin Scorsese putting his weight behind the film as executive producer. All of it — including the evocative cinematography and Amit Trivedi’s deeply emotional score — his benefits Homebound, and deservingly so.
But in the end, all accoutrements aside, it is two images that stay on with you. One is Chandan enveloping a down-and-out Shoaib in a comforting hug under the moon on the terrace. The other is a wailing Shoaib clinging on to Chandan’s almost lifeless body on a deserted highway as he wills him back to his feet. The rest of it is a blur. For you, in the audience, are fighting back your tears.
Homebound deserves to be India’s entry to the Oscars because...
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