Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound emerges as one of the most emotionally resonant and politically urgent films in contemporary Indian cinema. Following his critically acclaimed debut Masaan (2015), Ghaywan returns with a devastating tale that examines the intersections of friendship, caste discrimination, religious prejudice, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s brutal impact on India’s most vulnerable communities. Chosen as India’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, this meticulously crafted drama transcends regional storytelling to offer a universal meditation on human dignity, systemic oppression, and the enduring power of hope.
Homebound movie review: Story & Plot
The narrative follows Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter), a Muslim youth, and Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa), a Dalit, childhood friends from a small North Indian village who share an ambitious dream: to become police officers and escape the cycle of poverty and discrimination that has defined their lives. For them, a government job represents more than economic security—it promises the respect and dignity society has consistently denied them based on their religious and caste identities.
As they await results from the national police exam, the film’s first half establishes their friendship and the pervasive caste system that governs rural India with suffocating precision. A particularly piercing scene shows Chandan checking his exam results, only to be asked by an official which category he applied under. Vishal Jethwa’s performance captures the character’s hesitation and subsequent lie about belonging to the general category—a moment that reverberates through the film’s climax with devastating consequences.
When Chandan passes the exam but Shoaib doesn’t, their friendship begins to fracture under the weight of diverging fortunes. Adding complexity to the narrative is Sudha Bharti (Janhvi Kapoor), a fellow Dalit student from a slightly better-off background who develops a connection with Chandan. While Shoaib encounters anti-Muslim discrimination in temporary sales jobs, Chandan pursues college education partly to remain close to Sudha, though financial pressures eventually force both friends to seek work in a textile factory a thousand kilometers from home.
Then the pandemic strikes. The sudden nationwide lockdown announced on March 24, 2020, leaves millions of migrant workers jobless and stranded, triggering what has been described as India’s largest mass migration since Partition. Chandan and Shoaib join the desperate exodus, walking, running, and hitchhiking toward homes that seem impossibly distant. The film’s second half transforms into a tense, heartbreaking chronicle of their ordeal as the bonds of friendship are tested by hunger, exhaustion, and the cruel indifference of systems designed to protect them.
Homebound draws its narrative foundation from journalist Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times article titled “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway.” In May 2020, as India grappled with one of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns, Peer encountered a haunting photograph on social media: Mohammad Saiyub, a 22-year-old Muslim worker, cradling his unconscious friend Amrit Kumar, a 24-year-old Dalit man, on a deserted Madhya Pradesh highway. The image captured a moment of profound tenderness amid national tragedy—Amrit had succumbed to heatstroke during their desperate journey home after losing their factory jobs.
This real-life tragedy forms the emotional core of Ghaywan’s film, though the director, along with co-writers Sumit Roy and Basharat Peer, expands the narrative to explore the lives that preceded this devastating moment. The film doesn’t merely chronicle suffering; it grants its protagonists the dignity of three-dimensional existence, allowing audiences to understand their dreams, struggles, and the systemic barriers that shape their destinies.
Homebound movie review: Acting & direction
The film’s emotional impact is anchored by exceptional performances from its lead actors. Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter deliver what critics have unanimously praised as career-defining work, portraying Chandan and Shoaib with remarkable depth and authenticity.
Variety commended their “immensely endearing and unpredictable performances,” noting how both actors shed the gestures and affectations typical of urban, privileged backgrounds to embody characters shaped by marginalization. Jethwa’s portrayal of Chandan captures the character’s quiet resilience, his dreams of building a home for his family, and the weight of caste stigma he carries with dignity. Khatter’s Shoaib radiates both vulnerability and determination, conveying the daily humiliations of religious discrimination while maintaining his loyalty to Chandan.
The Hollywood Reporter described the film as “an emotionally resonant portrait of systemic cruelty and how ordinary men and women find the courage to defy it,” praising the leads for making viewers “a weeping mess” by the final act. Their chemistry feels lived-in and authentic, communicating as much through pauses and physicality as through dialogue, evoking the intimacy of lifelong friendship.
Janhvi Kapoor’s role as Sudha, while smaller and somewhat truncated, received mixed reviews. Variety noted that unlike her Dhadak co-star Khatter, Kapoor “hasn’t yet learned to shed the enunciations and gestures that suggest someone who was raised in a major city, surrounded by wealth.” However, this limitation is confined to a handful of scenes, and the film’s narrative focus remains firmly on the male friendship at its center.
Neeraj Ghaywan approaches his subjects with profound empathy and respect, refusing to reduce marginalized communities to stereotypes or poverty porn. As he explained in interviews, “When we talk about marginalised communities, cinema often shows them as incorruptible, earnest to a fault. But the cinematic characters have to be three-dimensional too. There are layers, contradictions, patriarchy even within the community. I wanted to bring in a more lived-in perspective.”
This nuanced approach ensures that Chandan and Shoaib are neither saints nor victims but fully realized human beings navigating impossible circumstances. The film acknowledges the contradictions within oppressed communities—the internalized prejudices, the aspirations shaped by dominant power structures, and the small moral compromises survival demands.
Ghaywan’s direction balances intimate character moments with broader social commentary, never lecturing but consistently illuminating how caste and religious identity shape every aspect of life—from job applications to romantic relationships to survival during a pandemic. The film forces recognition of systemic injustice without finger-pointing, serving as both mirror and witness.
Homebound movie review: India's official entry to The Oscars
Homebound operates on multiple thematic levels, addressing issues that remain painfully relevant in contemporary India and globally.
Caste and Religious Discrimination: The film’s most powerful achievement is its unflinching examination of how caste and religious identity determine life opportunities in India despite legal prohibitions. Chandan faces the daily indignities of being Dalit—the hesitation before revealing his surname, the shame of caste boxes on application forms, the assumption that merit alone cannot explain his success. Shoaib confronts rising Islamophobia, encountering suspicion and exclusion in workplaces where his religious identity marks him as perpetually other.
The film shows these prejudices as pervasive yet often invisible to those not affected, operating through institutional structures, casual conversations, and internalized shame. As one critic noted, “Neeraj’s cinema hits with truth because it comes from lived pain. The hesitation in using surnames, the shame of caste boxes, he shows it with a raw honesty and empathy that can’t be faked.”
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Migrant Crisis: Homebound is one of the first major Indian films to seriously engage with the pandemic’s impact, particularly the humanitarian crisis that unfolded when millions of migrant workers were forced to walk hundreds or thousands of kilometers to reach their native villages after the sudden lockdown.
The film doesn’t treat the pandemic as backdrop but as amplifier of existing inequalities. COVID revealed India’s fault lines with devastating clarity—who has homes to shelter in, who has savings to survive unemployment, whose lives are deemed expendable. The heart-wrenching visuals of migrants walking barefoot under a punishing sun, mothers feeding children with nothing but water, and highways becoming graveyards of ambition are presented not as spectacle but as scar, as “violence of neglect” by those in power.
Friendship and Belonging: At its emotional core, Homebound is a profound meditation on friendship—specifically, friendships forged in shared marginalization that both transcend and are tested by social divisions. Chandan and Shoaib see their struggles mirrored in each other, finding solidarity across religious and caste lines in a society that weaponizes such differences.
The concept of “home” itself becomes thematic territory. Where Shoaib is repeatedly asked “where is your true home?” as if his citizenship is conditional, Chandan dreams of building a home brick by brick for those who’ve never had one. Yet neither fully belongs—Shoaib is told to flee his homeland, while Chandan is never fully welcomed in it. They become wanderers in their own land, “summoned to move, again and again, never given the stillness that a home might offer.”
Water, Trains, and Migration: Visual motifs of water, trains, buses, and pigeons recur throughout the film, each symbolizing motion, impermanence, and lives always in transit. Water—rivers, streams—becomes the film’s most persistent symbol, representing both continuity and displacement, mirroring characters who must constantly move, denied the rootedness a true home provides.
Homebound premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 in the Un Certain Regard section, where it received a remarkable nine-minute standing ovation. The screening at the Debussy Theatre was attended by Ghaywan, producer Karan Johar, and the principal cast—Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, and Janhvi Kapoor. Videos from the premiere showed the audience erupting in applause, with voices of “Bravo” echoing through the auditorium, while Johar and Ghaywan shared an emotional embrace.
Homebound movie review: Final verdict
Homebound is not an easy watch—it demands emotional investment and confronts viewers with harsh truths about inequality, prejudice, and institutional failure. Yet it is precisely this unflinching honesty that makes the film essential viewing. Ghaywan has crafted a work that is simultaneously deeply Indian and universally resonant, a film about specific people in specific circumstances that speaks to fundamental questions of human dignity and belonging.
The performances by Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa are nothing short of extraordinary, conveying complex emotional landscapes with subtlety and power. The technical craftsmanship—from Pratik Shah’s observational cinematography to Nitin Baid’s rhythmic editing to Amit Trivedi’s haunting music—serves the story without overwhelming it, creating a cinematic experience that feels both intimate and epic.
Most importantly, Homebound refuses to let us forget what many would prefer to leave behind—the images of migrants walking home during lockdown, the lives lost to heatstroke and hunger, the systemic cruelties that determine who matters and who doesn’t. It is a film that jogs our collective memory, forcing recognition of realities we’ve normalized and silences we’ve accepted.
As India’s entry for the Academy Awards, Homebound carries the hopes of an industry seeking international validation while representing voices rarely centered in mainstream cinema. Whether it secures an Oscar nomination or not, the film has already achieved something more significant—it has created a lasting document of friendship, resilience, and humanity in the face of systemic oppression, ensuring that stories like Amrit’s and Saiyub’s, and by extension Chandan’s and Shoaib’s, are neither forgotten nor reduced to statistics.
In Ghaywan’s hands, Homebound becomes more than a film about caste, religion, or pandemic—it is a reminder of our shared humanity, a call for empathy in an increasingly divided world, and a testament to the bonds that sustain us when everything else fails. It is, quite simply, one of the most important Indian films of 2025 and a work that will resonate for years to come.
Homebound movie rating – 7/10 stars