‘Homebound’: A Tender Portrait of  ‘A Friendship, a Pandemic, and a Death Beside the Highway’

In recent years, filmmakers like Payal Kapadia have helped Indian independent cinema steadily gain a more visible and respected presence at the Cannes Film Festival. Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light,” which earned major honors in 2024, marked a quiet yet unmistakable shift. Continuing in that lineage, “Homebound” arrived—with its Cannes premiere on 21 May 202 —with a similar artistic confidence. Its selection for Un Certain Regard, followed by its announcement as India’s official submission for the 2026 Oscars, firmly positions the film as another significant milestone in contemporary Indian realism.

A Friendship that steals the show

I had been waiting for months to watch “Homebound,” so I sat glued to my TV screen when the film started streaming on Netflix. We have been listening to Ishaan Khatter speak with unguarded sincerity in YouTube interviews, and discussing the film without reading too much about it. The premise of two childhood friends—one Hindu, one Muslim—trying to escape the margins through a competitive government exam is great. But the film exceeded every expectation, on how the narrative is pushed forward. It is the best film I have watched in 2025.

What struck me almost immediately was how effortlessly Khatter and Vishal Jethwa dissolved into their characters. They do not perform Shoaib and Chandan—they simply inhabit them. Their friendship isn’t romanticized, nor is it deployed as a social message. It is presented as a lived truth, a soft lifeline in a hard world. Mapur, their small North Indian village, offers little beyond survival; in that bleakness, their companionship becomes their one shared luxury.

Class, and Coming of Age

Where “All We Imagine as Light” explored womanhood through a luminous reflection “Homebound” looks at coming of age, and responsible masculinity with a clear-eyed tenderness. Director Neeraj Ghaywan is not interested in stereotypical “struggle;” he focuses on the psychologically quiet, culturally loaded pressures that shape young men in lower-class Indian households. 

Chandan and Shoaib dream of becoming police constables—not for power, not for status, but for the simplest, most human desires:a brick house that doesn’t leak,
a pair of slippers for a mother who walks barefoot, a halt to the generational indignity of women doing sanitation work, enough savings for a father’s knee operation without the desperation of a Dubai job.

The title “Homebound” acquires a double meaning: returning to their village is both an act of survival and a slow undoing of their dreams.

The constable exam becomes their portal to dignity. Every night they study together, fighting sleep, sharing leftovers, holding in their chests the quiet ache of knowing that the system wasn’t designed for boys like them.

A World Observed in Detail

Ghaywan’s direction is meticulous but unpretentious. You never feel the camera calling attention to itself; instead, it creates the sensation of being present inside an unfolding life. Ghaywan’s background in documentary sensibility shows in how he captures fleeting gestures: a mother packing a small treat for the son to share with his colleagues( but asking him to bring the container back), a father hiding an injury because treatment is a luxury, two boys sharing a single pen between them.

One sequence, in particular, lingers long after the film ends: a train scene where hundreds of young aspirants travel to exam centers, carrying their dreams in their hearts. When the platform abruptly changes, Chandan and Shoaib sprint across live railway tracks, risking their lives for the exam that might lift their families out of generational poverty. The moment is terrifying not because of heightened drama but because it is heartbreakingly real.

And then, after all the sweat and sacrifice, both boys do not achieve the admission, even though Chandan’s name appears in the list. The scene opens the welled up frustration, a tightening of the despair above their heads.

When the Country isolates, the Poor Keep Moving

With their dreams deferred, Chandan and Shoaib take on factory work, saving money rupee by rupee. And then the pandemic hits—sudden, brutal, and indifferent. Their walk home becomes the spine of the film’s final act.

This is where Ghaywan’s restraint becomes devastating. He shows the long silences of exhaustion, thirst, hunger, the indignities absorbed without protest, the torrid landscapes transformed into obstacles for bodies already stretched to their limits. It echoes the real journeys of migrant workers across India during the lockdown: thousands walking hundreds of kilometers because hunger could not wait and transportation could not be afforded.

The title “Homebound” acquires a double meaning: returning to their village is both an act of survival and a slow undoing of their dreams.

An Adaptation With Integrity

Inspired by Basharat Peer’s New York Times essay “A Friendship, a Pandemic, and a Death Beside the Highway,” the film carries the emotional truth of the source while transforming it into something broader and more fictionalized. With Dharma Productions backing the project and Martin Scorsese serving as executive producer, Ghaywan is able to craft a film that is globally visible without compromising its intimacy. 

Homebound rejects melodrama. What it offers instead is a portrait of friendship so tender that it becomes memorable, and a depiction of their struggle so precise that it becomes impossible to ignore.

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With one foot in Huntsville, Alabama, the other in her birth home, India, and a heart steeped in humanity, Monita Soni writes as a contemplative practice. She has published hundreds of poems, movie reviews, book critiques, and essays, and contributed to combined literary works. Her two books are My Light Reflections and Flow Through My Heart. You can hear her commentaries on Sundial Writers Corner, WLRH 89.3 FM.