Homebound (2025)

 Homebound (2025)

This blog is based on movie Homebound and this task was assigned by Dilip Barad sir. Click Here

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound offers a powerful critical reading of the film’s stark depiction of India’s migrant crisis during the COVID-19 lockdown. It portrays the journey itself as an instrument of suffering, while the absence and indifference of the state loom large. Through this unsettling narrative, the film compels viewers to confront a reality that can no longer be ignored.

PART I: PRE-SCREENING CONTEXT & ADAPTATION

1. Source Material Analysis

The transformation of Basharat Peer’s journalistic essay into 'Homebound' represents more than a movement from non-fiction to fictional storytelling; it marks a deliberate reorientation of the narrative’s political emphasis. In the original essay, Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub are migrant textile laborers, standing in for the vast workforce of India’s informal economy. Their ordeal is situated within structures of economic vulnerability and systemic governmental indifference.

By reimagining these figures as aspirants to the police force, the film shifts the story from the margins of economic survival to the realm of civic aspiration. This alteration intensifies the emotional and political impact of the narrative. Chandan and Shoaib are not positioned as alienated subjects excluded from the state; rather, they are individuals who place their faith in it. The police uniform comes to signify respectability, authority, and the hope that institutional belonging can transcend entrenched caste and religious hierarchies. In doing so, the film extends its critique beyond material deprivation to expose the illusion of merit-based inclusion, suggesting that aspiration itself is entangled in systems of exploitation.

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 operates as a powerful illusion of neutrality. For Chandan and Shoaib, it holds out the promise of an identity cleansed of caste and religious markers. However, the film steadily strips away this illusion. The overwhelming ratio of 2.5 million applicants competing for just 3,500 positions reduces the ideal of meritocracy to something almost mythical.

More significantly, *Homebound* implies that even attaining the uniform would not secure genuine respect or dignity. While it may offer visibility within the system, it does not ensure equality. In this way, the film reveals the uniform as an emblem of aspirational violence—one that persuades marginalized individuals to strive within a structure fundamentally organized to keep them on the margins.

4. Intersectionality: Caste and Religion 

Case A: Chandan and Caste Shame

Chandan’s choice to apply under the ‘General’ category reflects what sociologists term internalized caste oppression. The fear is not legal disadvantage but social exposure. Reservation becomes stigmatized as moral weakness, revealing how neoliberal discourse reframes structural injustice as personal failure.

Case B: Shoaib and Quiet Cruelty

The water bottle scene is devastating precisely because it lacks confrontation. This is everyday communalism, normalized through politeness. The refusal is framed as hygiene or discomfort, masking prejudice beneath civility. The film thus exposes how modern discrimination operates not through violence, but through ritualized distance.

5. Pandemic as Narrative Device

The lockdown does not interrupt the film’s narrative so much as it lays it bare. What may seem like a shift in genre is, in fact, a continuation of the same structural logic. The pandemic does not introduce new forms of suffering; it intensifies pre-existing vulnerabilities.

By adopting the rhythms of a survival thriller, the film foregrounds a stark reality: for marginalized communities, existence itself is already lived under emergency conditions. COVID-19 merely strips away the fragile appearance of normalcy. In this way, *Homebound* reconceptualizes the pandemic not as an isolated disaster, but as a catalyst that accelerates the slow, ongoing violence embedded in everyday life.

PART III: CHARACTER & PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

6. Vishal Jethwa’s Somatic Performance

Vishal Jethwa’s performance is defined by a gradual physical contraction that functions as a lesson in embodied sociology. His body appears to foresee degradation even before it is enacted, enacting a form of anticipatory compliance shaped by long histories of caste oppression. This inherited trauma is communicated less through dialogue than through stance, gesture, and restraint.

The moment in which he pauses before uttering his full name crystallizes this condition: identity itself becomes a source of risk. What society insists on denying, the body continues to carry. Through this somatic precision, the performance transforms into a living archive—historical memory inscribed directly onto the flesh.

7. Ishaan Khatter and the “Othered” Citizen

Shoaib’s trajectory lays bare the contradiction at the heart of Muslim citizenship in India. His refusal to migrate to Dubai signals a rejection of economic displacement, yet his decision to remain is met not with belonging but with doubt and scrutiny.

The anger he carries is carefully contained rather than eruptive, reflecting the film’s awareness that minority rage is constantly monitored, regulated, and penalized. Shoaib’s suffering stems from an unwavering attachment to a country that withholds reciprocity. In this context, “home” is not an assured right but a provisional condition—one that must be endlessly explained, defended, and earned.

Gendered Perspectives: Sudha Bharti (Janhvi Kapoor)

Sudha Bharti’s presence introduces a subtle asymmetry within the film’s narrative. Although Janhvi Kapoor offers a restrained and nuanced performance, the character is positioned less as a fully realized individual and more as a structural device. Sudha largely occupies the role of witness and ethical anchor, embodying the educational access and relative social privilege unavailable to the male protagonists.

Her limited capacity to intervene underscores one of the film’s central ironies: even education and cultural capital lose their efficacy when confronted with systemic breakdown and large-scale humanitarian neglect. Through Sudha, the film suggests that individual advantage offers little protection—or agency—within a landscape defined by institutional failure.

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 

The muting of innocuous words reveals censorship as symbolic control rather than content regulation. Food and language become political because they signify everyday coexistence.

The state’s discomfort lies not in explicit critique, but in normalizing marginal voices. Social realism threatens power because it renders injustice ordinary.

12. Ethics of Adaptation

This dimension of the film raises its most fraught ethical questions. Allegations of plagiarism by Puja Changoiwala, along with reports that Amrit Kumar’s family received little or no compensation, seriously unsettle the film’s moral standing. These controversies compel a difficult but essential inquiry: can a work that critiques capitalist exploitation legitimately do so while depending on extractive creative practices of its own?

Invocations of “raising awareness” often operate as a shield for artistic intent. Yet when the lives of those whose suffering grounds the narrative remain materially unaffected—while the film accrues awards, prestige, and financial gain—the empathy it produces risks remaining merely symbolic. Under such conditions, the act of representation itself may replicate the very exploitative structures the film claims to expose.

13. Commercial Viability vs Art 

Homebound’s failure reveals a post-pandemic crisis of attention. Serious cinema competes with algorithmic entertainment and escapism.

The film’s fate exposes a market that rewards distraction over discomfort, raising urgent questions about the future of socially committed cinema.

Conclusion

'Homebound' ultimately contends that in contemporary India, dignity is eroded less by overt brutality than by sustained indifference. The journey toward home does not signify return or restoration; instead, it exposes the unsettling truth that “home” itself is structurally unwelcoming to those on the margins.

The film pointedly withholds redemption, not out of cynicism, but out of fidelity to reality, where resolution is rarely available to the dispossessed. By rejecting emotional closure, 'Homebound' redefines the function of cinema—not as a source of comfort or moral reassurance, but as an act of bearing witness. In this refusal to console, the film insists that seeing, remembering, and remaining unsettled are themselves ethical responsibilities of the viewer.