The Dignity Of Difficult Watching: What We Owe Films Like 'Homebound'

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound operates as both an indexical document and a formal interrogation, a film that deploys cinematic excellence itself to make visible the mechanisms of structural violence. It reveals how marginalisation operates not through grand gestures but through spatial arrangements and the exhausting dailiness of having to prove one’s humanity.

The film’s formal strategies, shallow focus in threatening spaces, sound design that maps social boundaries, shots held until waiting itself becomes violence, create a visual sociology of oppression.

Watch how bodies are filmed: Chandan and Shoaib appear in fragments, silence marking the borders of belonging. These aren’t aesthetic flourishes; they are documentation of how discrimination functions, in small gestures and inherited distances that feel natural but are socially constructed.

The repeated taunts, the gaze that diminishes, the quiet humiliations, all accumulate into a lived burden. Against that, the longing for a government job becomes not a mere aspiration but a desire for immunity, a hope that official recognition might finally silence daily suspicion.

The migrant crisis provides the film’s shattering climax, but Ghaywan has been building toward it from the first frame, showing us that the pandemic didn’t create hierarchies; it merely exposed them. When Shoaib falls on that highway holding Chandan and the camera pans from across the road, refusing to cut away, refusing to grant us the mercy of ellipsis, we are watching both death and silence. This is cinema as evidence, the screen as witness, filmmaking that makes it impossible to claim we didn’t see what we saw.

The Grammar of Everyday Oppression

If Homebound’s climax devastates, its power lies equally in the quiet grammar of its build-up.

The film’s genius lies in documenting how marginalisation is lived, not as a dramatic confrontation but as an accumulated erosion. A name repeated three times, though heard perfectly the first time. A job interview where qualifications matter less than lineage. These aren’t plot points; they are anthropological observations of how power maintains itself through a thousand small cuts.

Watch how the film frames physical space: Chandan and Shoaib are constantly filmed at thresholds, doorways they hesitate to cross, rooms they occupy without inhabiting, conversations they orbit but never join. The camera becomes a measuring instrument of social distance, documenting the exclusion.

This is what discrimination looks like in practice, the everyday architecture that tells certain bodies they don’t belong. And Homebound understands intersectionality intuitively: caste compounds with religion, both intersect with class, and poverty intensifies it all. Shoaib’s identity and Chandan’s background are parallel testimonies to the same structural truth.

The Longing for a Government Job: Dignity as Bureaucratic Fantasy

One of the film’s most quietly devastating threads is the characters’ fixation on government employment, sarkari naukri as promised land. This isn’t merely about salary or security; it’s about the fantasy of institutional protection; the dream that a government ID card might finally grant immunity from daily humiliation. That official letterhead might silence the questions. That a uniform might command the respect their humanity alone cannot.

This longing reveals something profound about how marginalisation operates: it convinces you that dignity must be earned rather than inherent, that respect comes from titles rather than being owed to all humans. The tragedy isn’t simply that they fail to get these jobs; it’s that they needed them to feel safe in the first place, so thoroughly convinced of their own illegitimacy that even they have internalised the belief that only institutional authority can validate their existence.

Cinema as Evidence: The Camera That Refuses to Look Away

When Shoaib collapses on that highway with Chandan’s body in his hand, the camera remains distant, unflinching. No cutaways. No merciful score to guide emotion. Just the brutal fact of a body on hot asphalt, one among thousands walking home because, when crisis came, the city remembered they were disposable.

This is where Homebound transcends fiction to become documentation. The pandemic didn’t invent hierarchies; it stripped away the polite fictions that hid them. The migrant crisis was not an aberration but a revelation, showing us what we already believed: that certain lives are expendable, that certain labour is essential only until the labourer becomes inconvenient, that we consume their work while refusing to recognise their humanity.

Why We Fail as Audiences

Homebound premiered at Cannes to a nine-minute standing ovation and was selected as India’s official entry to the Oscars. It received rapturous critical acclaim, yet barely anyone went to see it in theatres.

This disconnect isn’t incidental; it’s diagnostic. We celebrate such films when they win abroad, but rarely want to confront them at home. We prefer our social commentary sanitised, our oppression narratives neatly resolved, our perceptions served with redemption arcs.

Homebound offers none of these comforts. It ends not with reform or revolution but with survival and memory. It asks us to sit with discomfort, to witness without the relief of resolution.

Films like Homebound deserve more than festival laurels and critical essays. They deserve packed theatres and cultural conversation, not as niche “festival films,” but as essential national cinema. They deserve audiences willing to be uncomfortable, to have their assumptions challenged, to witness lives they’d rather not think about.

This kind of cinema, patient, observational, refusing easy answers, is radical because it treats marginalised lives as worthy of complex storytelling. It doesn’t turn oppression into spectacle or trauma into inspiration. It simply insists: Look. See. Remember.

Ghaywan’s filmmaking is an act of profound respect; he trusts his audience to understand nuance, to sit with ambiguity, to do the emotional labour of empathy without being spoon-fed. That we largely refuse this invitation says more about us than about his film. Homebound is cinema as moral obligation, filmmaking as witness testimony, storytelling as resistance against erasure. It succeeds not when we applaud it, but when we let it change us, when its images become impossible to unsee.

The Cinematic Achievement

Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter deliver performances that blur the line between acting and being. Jethwa’s Chandan carries his identity like a physical weight,  visible in posture, gait, and the cautious way he inhabits space. Khatter’s Shoaib burns with a coiled rage that escapes only in moments of private fury.

The supporting cast, especially the women, brings depth and authenticity that ground the film in lived experience. Every face tells a story; every extra feels like a protagonist in an untold narrative. This attention to the collective, even within an intimate story, marks Homebound as sophisticated social realism.

Technically, the film is masterful. Editing maintains a rhythm that balances epic scope with emotional intimacy. The muted colour palette, earthy tones punctuated by fleeting bursts of colour (a festival, a cricket ball), feels both natural and poetic. The sound design deserves special mention: from the hum of village life to the hollow silence of empty highways, sound becomes another form of storytelling.

The Lasting Frame

Homebound achieves what cinema at its most powerful can accomplish: it changes how we see. Through patient observation, emotional honesty, and visual poetry, it transforms statistics into stories and headlines into heartbeats. The film offers no solutions; it’s too honest for that, but it does something rarer: it insists that these lives, these struggles, these dreams matter.

In the end, watching Homebound feels less like consuming entertainment and more like bearing witness. The film stays with you,  a friend’s laughter before tragedy, sandals never worn, a house finally built. It reminds us that cinema, at its best, isn’t about showing us other worlds, but about revealing the one we already inhabit,  the one we too often visibly ignore.

Film review by Vanshika Chhabra | Views expressed by the author are their own.