HOMEBOUND (2025)
A Film Review
Oscar Night Preview | March 15, 2026
★★★★¼ 8.5 / 10
The One That Got Away
Let me say this upfront: the fact that Homebound won’t be celebrated at the Dolby Theatre next Sunday — on Oscar night, March 15, 2026 — is one of the more quietly painful snubs of recent memory. Not because India desperately needed a golden trophy to validate its cinema. But because this film, more than almost anything released in the past year, deserved to be in that room.
And yet, here we are. The Academy has spoken. The five nominees for Best International Feature Film are Brazil’s The Secret Agent, France’s It Was Just an Accident, Norway’s Sentimental Value, Spain’s Sirât, and Tunisia’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. India’s Homebound had made it to the 15-film shortlist — becoming only the fifth Indian film in history to achieve that milestone — but fell at the final fence. And in doing so, it extended India’s nomination drought, with Lagaan (2001) remaining the last Indian film to receive a nomination in this category.
Chandan and Shoaib are the same archetype on Indian dust roads. The dreamer and the realist. The one who believes the system might let him in, and the one who knows better. The friendship in both films isn’t sentimental — it’s necessary. It’s what remains after everything else has been stripped away.
But don’t let the snub tell you what this film is worth. Trophies are politics. Homebound is art.
The Story
Director Neeraj Ghaywan — who has called himself the first acknowledged Dalit filmmaker in Indian cinema’s history — based this on a real New York Times op-ed: ‘A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway.’ Martin Scorsese, who executive produced the film, described their collaboration as a mentorship that ran from first draft to final cut. Homebound production team called him ‘elder brother’ in all internal communications, such was the quiet reverence for his involvement.
The film follows two young men — Chandan, a Dalit, and Shoaib, a Muslim — who travel to Surat as migrant laborers chasing a simple dream: pass the police exam, wear a uniform, and let caste and religion stop mattering. When the pandemic shuts everything down, they have to walk home. Thousands of miles. On foot. And the film walks every step with them.
Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa are extraordinary together — lived-in, unpredictable, funny in the way that only people who truly know each other are funny. You believe them completely. Which is why what happens later hits so hard.
The Craft
Cinematographer Pratik Shah shoots the pandemic exodus — millions of workers walking empty highways — with a beauty that never tips into exploitation. It’s documentary-honest and painterly at once. The score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor is restrained and right: Indian rhythms that don’t announce themselves, they simply accompany you.
The single greatest moment of editing I’ve seen this year belongs to this film. Chandan’s mother — a devastating Shalini Vatsa — is barred from cooking for schoolchildren because of her caste. A father yells, ‘You can keep your constitution.’ Cut. Silence. She sits alone with a photograph of Ambedkar. The cut says everything the script doesn’t need to.
Two Friends, One Road — and Midnight Cowboy
I couldn’t stop thinking about Midnight Cowboy. Schlesinger’s 1969 masterpiece about Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo — two men the city has discarded, holding each other up until one of them can’t go any further. Ratso dying on that Florida bus, Joe cradling him. One of cinema’s most devastating endings.
Chandan and Shoaib are the same archetype on Indian dust roads. The dreamer and the realist. The one who believes the system might let him in, and the one who knows better. The friendship in both films isn’t sentimental — it’s necessary. It’s what remains after everything else has been stripped away. And when Homebound reaches its tragedy, it carries that same unbearable grief: the world failed someone who deserved better, and the only person who saw it was the one who loved them.
Also Read: A Life Well-Lived: Alice Munro (1931-2024)
The difference is where the wound lives. Midnight Cowboy’s cruelty is urban anonymity. Homebound’s is structural and ancient — caste, religion, a constitution that promises equality to people who are then told, to their face, that no one cares about the constitution.
Ghaywan vs Ghaywan
His debut, Masaan (2015), was a miracle of restraint — grief held so tightly in a small Varanasi frame that it hurt to breathe. It won two prizes at Cannes and announced a filmmaker who trusted silence. Homebound is bigger, bolder, and occasionally less precise because of it. The Ambedkar photograph is one beat too pointed. A line or two land like thesis statements when they should just land. Masaan never let you see the scaffolding.
But I’ll take a film that reaches and occasionally shows its effort over one that plays it safe. The scope here is earned. And when Ghaywan gets it right — which is most of the time — he gets it more right than almost anyone making cinema today.
Should It Have Been Nominated?
Yes. It belongs in the conversation with Roma, Parasite, The Zone of Interest — films that put the invisible at the center and let the system be the villain. Where it may have stumbled is in the campaign. The specificity that makes Homebound exceptional — the Dalit-Muslim axis, the texture of North Indian migrant life, the cruel poetry of a police exam that promises dignity — needed more cultural translation for a Western voting body. The film is there. The infrastructure around it wasn’t.
The Final Word
Homebound is not a perfect film. It’s something rarer: a necessary one. Next Sunday, while the Oscars celebrate their chosen films, this one will be sitting outside that room — the way Chandan and Shoaib spend the whole film sitting outside rooms that were never quite built for them. It’s almost too apt.
But it will endure. It will be taught in film schools. It will be found by the people who needed it. And India’s wait for Oscar recognition goes on — but if this is the standard we’re reaching, that wait won’t last forever.
★★★★¼ 8.5 / 10
Haunting. Honest. Essential.
Homebound (2025) | Dir. Neeraj Ghaywan | Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, Janhvi Kapoor
Exec. Producer: Martin Scorsese | Dharma Productions | 117 mins | Hindi
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Mousumi was raised in Kolkata but now call New York her home. She pursued her PhD from Indiana University Bloomington and currently works as a Marketing & Consumer Data and Design Analytics professional. She is Co-founder and Director at MDRK Partners. She loves to read, cook, take photos on her phone and travel.
