Homebound

Few species, if any, live with disparities as extreme as ours. That disparity is precisely what international cinema can make visceral, and Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound does so through a story rooted in documented reality: a 2020 New York Times Opinion piece. It concerned a heartbreaking photograph and the bond between two childhood friends in India, Mohammad Saiyub, a 22-year-old Muslim, and Amrit Kumar, a 24-year-old Dalit man from a caste-oppressed community (often classified as Scheduled Caste in official terms).

Ghaywan’s second feature retells their story under slightly different names, Mohammed Shoaib and Chandan Kumar, and follows their aspirations to become police officers in what is now the world’s most populous country, where ambition becomes arithmetic: roughly 2.5 million applicants competing for about 3,500 vacancies. In that sense, Homebound is strongest when it observes how a system designed for “scale” turns people into numbers while keeping them legible as caste and creed, and how friendship becomes a small, stubborn refusal of that erasure.

On application forms, Chandan avoids ticking the Scheduled Caste box because, in his world, the checkbox is not only an entitlement but an exposure. Entering that category into the state record can become a permanent mark, shaping how colleagues and superiors treat you long after the exam. Ghaywan hints at a bitter truth: even when someone wins a role associated with respect, caste can still reassert itself through petty humiliations and relegation to lesser work.

Homebound is also blunt about the myth of education as a clean ladder out of poverty. In theory, the exam is meritocracy; in practice, it is triage, not a path so much as a narrowing funnel. When they see the sheer mass of applicants and one of them asks, “Are we taking an exam or going to war?”, the line lands as more than gallows humour. It is the moment the promise of schooling curdles into survival logic.

Still, Homebound is a cautious drama. It often shows the social pressures clearly, then hesitates to frame them. Mohammed’s family pushes him toward Dubai, a familiar escape route for those who feel their country offers them no future, yet he still loves the place that does not love him back. It is even more pointed in a painful scene when he is invited to his boss’s home to watch an India-Pakistan cricket match and a co-worker repeatedly jokes about him rooting for Pakistan. Everyone laughs, including the boss, and the humor becomes a soft weapon, a way to make belonging conditional and humiliation communal. These moments are not merely interpersonal slights, they are the daily texture of an ecosystem where Muslims and caste-oppressed people learn to manage their visibility. That is why Ghaywan’s reluctance to name the structure behind what it depicts can feel less like nuance and more like self-protection.

And yet the central relationship is quietly devastating. The men’s different identities do not sit alongside each other so much as fold into each other, their bond shaped by the shared pressure of marginalisation. Kindness, in a system that grinds people down through sheer volume, becomes both backbone and coping mechanism, a way to survive the daily witnessing of difficult lives.

It is also one of the rare works where Covid-19 is not a convenient plot device but an unavoidable condition of reality. I’m often skeptical of pandemic storytelling used as atmosphere or narrative shortcut. Here, it feels justified because it invites a blunt recognition that this happened, and it happened to specific bodies, in specific places, under specific policies. The pandemic becomes less “background” than proof of how differently the world fractures under the same event.

Maybe that’s why Homebound lands so hard: we still don’t really have a single, widely seen documentary that juxtaposes the pandemic head-on across places and borders, following real people through the same months and showing how unevenly a “global event” was lived. In the absence of that unified record, dramatic features based on real events become the next best way we piece together the pandemic’s fractured reality, one local truth at a time.

Another area where Homebound excels is its painful yet emotionally intelligent depiction of a child’s quiet, steadfast duty toward downtrodden parents, not sentimentalised, but lived. Still, details that could anchor its political texture are downplayed. The presence of BR Ambedkar’s portraits in Dalit households, for example, flashes by without being allowed to accumulate meaning. Ambedkar was a Dalit jurist, anti-caste leader, and the chief architect of India’s Constitution. Too much of the social grammar remains out of reach unless viewers are willing to research afterwards, and a drama this grounded in real structures shouldn’t require homework to fully land.

That Homebound is India’s official submission for the 98th Academy Awards (Oscars 2026) adds an extra layer to its caution. Last season, the UK selected Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, a police drama also set in north India, and that film is striking precisely because it refuses to soften the institutional picture. Brutality, misogyny, Islamophobia, and anti-Dalit discrimination are not subtext but the system itself. Against that recent precedent, Homebound can feel like it wants the aura of “social realism” without fully naming the machinery that produces the suffering it depicts.

Reviewed on: 28 Dec 2025