'Homebound' Movie Review: A Triumph of Empathy In An Age of Curated Stories

Hope is the star-crossed protagonist of Homebound, a film that retraces the margins of Indian living as the layout of a ‘Snakes and Ladders’ board game. The pattern is unforgiving. Every time there is progress, it is inevitably punctured by a cruel twist of fate; every small leap is laced with the threat of a steep fall. An office peon impresses the bosses and gets promoted to salesman against the odds, but the feel-goodness is short-lived. A young factory worker sends money back home to fund a concrete roof, but his underdog-ness is transient. A bitter spat is followed by a life-affirming reunion, but the joy is brief. This constant snuffing out of hope reflects the skewed social structure of a country where everything — including emotions — are hierarchical. There is no respite; indignity has a pecking order.

The two childhood friends in the story are united by the ladders they are denied and divided by the length of the snakes that keep swallowing them. Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa) is a Dalit striver whose family slogs to enable his dream of police recruitment; Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter) is a Muslim striver who resists a move to Dubai to aid his ageing parents. As minorities in an era of run-of-the-mill fascism, their bond is shaped by solidarity and mutual disenchantment. Chandan stands up for Shoaib and Shoaib defends Chandan; they are close by virtue of the corners they share. Their brotherhood is bereft of identity: the families mingle, Chandan’s love for biryani becomes an in-joke, and Shoaib is like a second son in Chandan’s house.

They might be victims of one society, but their erasure is obligated to be plural — their invisibilisation is forced to compete. Neeraj Ghaywan’s film conspires to reveal that oppression in a democracy is shaped by the democracy of oppression: stigma is relative in the intersectionality of caste, faith and gender. Someone always has it worse — be it the disenfranchised Hindu, the working-class Muslim, the college-going Dalit girl, the uneducated farmhand or the unmarried Dalit woman. When Chandan complains about injustice, his sister reminds him that at least he has the opportunity to try; their parents chose to empower him, not her, and their collective income ensures that he isn’t bogged down by the burden of responsibility. He is a beneficiary of patriarchy without realising it.

At one point, Chandan lies about his name so that the cops thrashing Shoaib treat him with equal impunity; it’s like he’s testing to see if one prejudice hurts more than the other. When Chandan’s girlfriend Sudha (Janhvi Kapoor) — who belongs to a slightly more mobile Dalit family — wonders why he opts for short-term vindication (a police constable post) over long-term stability (graduation), he reminds her that their idea of success is not the same; the security of a government job is a need and he does not have the time to ‘build’ a self-made journey. When Chandan keeps ticking the general category in admission forms, Shoaib scolds him for skipping the reservation quota and disowning his identity; the implication is that someone like Shoaib isn’t even afforded that much. When Shoaib storms out of a party after becoming the butt of a few Islamophobic jokes, he reminds his well-meaning manager that Shoaib himself stands no chance when those in the position to speak up look away. The system is rigged against everyone differently, but the nature of disadvantage stems from the culpability of a culture that’s wired to reason with the prey rather than condemn the predator. Shoaib is requested to change so that the haters can continue to be themselves.

It’s natural to admire Homebound for being bare and critical in an age of political intolerance. A film about systemic rot and exclusion is a direct indictment of those in power. Whenever Shoaib and Chandan are wronged, the history of prejudice meets the weaponisation of tradition; the bigotry is so normalised that the irony of seeking employment from the government barely registers. But the reason the film is so effective is because it’s pro-humanity, not anti-establishment. The commentary is designed to suggest that socially aware films tend to get reduced to their commentary; this results in the desensitisation of expression, where the purpose of speaking drowns the personality of creating. It never looks like Homebound is out to make a resounding statement. If anything, the words find each other and happen to sound like one.

Take the framework of the film. Homebound is inspired by Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times essay called ‘Taking Amrit Home'. It revolves around two mill workers in Surat who struggle to return to their village hundreds of kilometers away during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The widely shared article emerges from the tragedy of India’s migrant exodus and the fight to reach home in the first wave of the pandemic. Most movies would have started with the end before delving into the past; it’s the common device of establishing the identity of the story and its protagonists. But the way Homebound flows reclaims the anonymity of everyday conflict from the clutches of premeditated critique; it reclaims the people concealed by genres and numbers. Every character and scene unfolds like they’re in a moment and oblivious of what is to come. When the pandemic arrives, it’s more like the last straw in the life of people who are used to pulling the short straw — what we see until then isn’t the backstory of two migrants in a lockdown, but the story of two friends absorbing one battle after another. The crisis is yet another obstacle, the chaos sneaks up on everyone (including the audience), and the film isn’t reduced to the specificity of its scrutiny. The sudden zoom-out of context is like a punchline — similar to that viral tweet about an ‘alternative’ climax of Succession, where Kendall Roy finally becomes the CEO only for the camera to zoom out and show him seated in his office in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The craft of Homebound supports its expanded gaze. The visual callbacks are neat. A crammed train of small-town exam aspirants echoes a packed truck of ‘homebound’ migrant workers; the joy of one friend piggybacking another while winning in sport echoes the agony of one friend carrying another in the lockdown. A striking top-angle shot of people walking at night on an intermittently lit bridge evokes a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel paradox. There’s also a Moneyball-coded shot where the camera runs parallel to a speeding bike before joining it at an intersection; the influence (even the background score) is sort of fitting, given that Moneyball used the genre ruse of a biopic to explore the humans behind the statistics. The writing is intuitive, in that it first stages the contrasting fortunes of the friends — Chandan is on a high when Shoaib is not, and vice versa — until they converge at a point rather than colliding. It’s as if both ‘outsiders’ do not have the permission to be happy at once, so they take turns feeling just as they take turns sleeping in a shared flat or doing shifts in a factory.

Some of the dialogue is a bit on-the-nose. Like the conversations between Sudha and Chandan: especially when Sudha spells out her conflict and recalls her family history to explain her behaviour. Or the way Shoaib schools Chandan for not appreciating what he has. It’s that old habit, where urban makers speak through self-aware characters and the characters speak at each other for the viewers. They seem to be knowing and thinking things because they’re the protagonists, not because they have culled wisdom from years of experience. But as in a film like Dhadak 2, or Gully Boy, expository exchanges are a necessary evil in an age where subtlety is the refuge of the privileged. A dash of cinema is necessary to counter the hush of reality. Most of us assume that subtext is enough or that gestures and silences should tell a story, but it’s easy to forget that silence is also the language of complicity. It’s therefore telling that the film’s most powerful scenes do not feature words at all — a young man’s stoicism collapses after years of repression, a mother’s chest quivers with newborn grief on receiving bad news, a girl’s shock looks for an outlet during a tragic phone call.

The performances are perfectly calibrated. Janhvi Kapoor has only a couple of scenes but casting her as a sheltered student — an upper-class and informed Dalit voice — is smart. As Chandan’s mother, Shalini Vatsa deserves special mention for depicting womanhood as an accumulation of sacrifice; even within a landscape of loss, nobody surrenders more than she does. Vishal Jethwa is solid as Chandan Kumar, a character whose masculinity and agency mutate into guilt and pragmatism. Despite setbacks, he is more consigned to his fate than resigned to it; it’s like he’s seen the director’s first film, Masaan, and internalised the persecution of his setting without meaning to. But it’s Ishaan Khatter who delivers one of the finest turns this year as Shoaib. The way he plays — and unlearns — the baggage of visibility, both as actor and character, brings to mind the way an actor like Alia Bhatt places emotional authenticity over lived-in truth. When he reacts, it doesn’t matter how he speaks or looks; it’s the kind of cultural cognizance that cannot be taught. Khatter is so compelling that he makes Shoaib look like he’s trying hard not to be desensitised by pain and alienation; he’s trying to preserve his ability to detect the apathy around him. You can even tell the difference between the sinking of his spirit and the breaking of his heart.

His performance defines the outlook of a film that’s largely shot in the day — in unrelenting sunlight — to defy the inherent darkness of its themes. There is a tangible undertow of empathy: victory in defeat, linearity in oppression, and stillness in an age of starved snakes and shaky ladders. The film refuses to be stranded in time; the skepticism has a before and an after. Most importantly, this tone doesn’t feel dishonest; the compassion here is a consequence of resilience and continuity, not the message of a story. The world doesn’t stop revolving, even if its lives come full circle. It’s like watching two beaten-but-not-broken strangers take a boat to their future at the end of Masaan; they’re tired of surviving, so living is the only option. For some, being homebound is an escape from obscurity. For others, it’s the freedom of being bound by the shackles of home.