Homebound ★★½

A decade after his last cinematic effort, Neeraj Ghaywan returns with a prestige project, shepherded by executive producer Martin Scorsese, that pairs the lyrical sentiment of his early work with a timely social realism. The latter is grounded in Basharat Peer’s 2020 article that inspired the plot and its paradigmatic portrayal of male friendship. Stifled aspiration and systemic injustice in contemporary India form the background of the two young main characters’ transformative journey away from their rural home and impoverished families, and back again. Childhood friends Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa) share a marginalized social background and the dream of escaping it. 

The way to do this, so the idealistic protagonist-pair believes, is passing the national police examination. A civil service job promises dignity and an escape from the inherited prejudice of their social caste. In a biased society stacked against them, the elliptical story charts their struggle, hopes, and brotherhood under increasingly difficult circumstances. What begins as a tale of ambition morphs into a harsh confrontation with India’s brutal socio-economic and communal realities. Writer-director Ghaywan elegantly elevates their intertwining insecurity, worries, and hope in long, moody sequences emphasizing everyday details: cramped homes, dusty roads, exhaustion, and want. Their economic vulnerability is supposed to make their dreams more urgent and emphasize the fragility of their friendship, but feels strangely staged.

The realism is realism only in a stylistic sense: a specific mood and mannerism informed more by cinematic conventions, academic ideas about structural disadvantage, and narrative tropes than actual experience. Performance-wise, Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa nevertheless capture a lively bond forged by affection and mutual understanding, but hardened by distrust. Their differing temperaments and individual challenges highlight the exemplary nature of their connected fates, traced over several years. When Chandan earns a coveted spot and Mohammed does not, a rift emerges. One of them moves tentatively toward the promise of state employment, the other has to make do with a makeshift job in the city’s electronics trade. 

For Muslims such as Mohammed, proving reliability becomes a daily negotiation in a Hindu-majority environment. Small, but emotionally monumental moments reveal the social tensions they carry with them. Chandan hesitates to share his surname with female fellow student Sudha Bharti (Janhvi Kapoor); Mohammed must contain his frustration when required to present documentation beyond what others must produce. Prejudice becomes a pedagogic spectacle for a target audience safely removed from it. Structure and pacing reflect the overarching theme of male camaraderie, cast restraints, and COVID-19: leisurely when building ordinary lives, but pathetically pressing when social collapse closes in. When the COVID-19 lockdown hits, the friends who drifted apart under the strain of diverging fortunes find themselves drawn back into one another’s orbit.
The impact of the lockdown forming the backdrop of the original story hits with a bureaucratic brutality. Ordinary routines vanish, dreams collapse, and their journey home becomes fraught with peril and heartbreak. The final act ultimately succumbs to the melodrama and moralism that the balanced blending of personal and political hurdles avoids in the first chapters. Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor’s swelling score complements the glossy images, wrapping systemic exclusion and economic marginalization into the artistic artifice of elevated entertainment. For all its conceptual refinement and intellectual impetus, Homebound remains stuck in humanist hypocrisy, made by and for a privileged clientele on the opposite end of its aestheticized adversary.