Homebound

Ten years after Masaan, Neeraj Ghaywan comes back with a film that settles the question of whether he is the most morally serious director working in mainstream Hindi cinema. He is. The story comes from Basharat Peer's 2020 New York Times piece about migrant workers during the lockdown, and Martin Scorsese is on board as executive producer, having worked with Ghaywan on the script and sat through three separate cuts.

Two childhood friends in a small north Indian town are chasing the same narrow exit. Chandan, played by Vishal Jethwa, is Dalit, academically gifted, and permanently braced for impact. He ticks "General" on forms. He hides his surname. He absorbs humiliation in silence and files it somewhere. Shoaib, played by Ishaan Khatter, is Muslim, and quicker to anger, and quicker to swing. Both want the same job: police constable. It has almost nothing to do with policing. It is about a uniform. It is about being, for once in your life, the person nobody feels entitled to degrade in public. Ghaywan understands that dignity, when you are at the bottom, is not an abstraction. It's a document. It's a designation. It's the colour of your shirt.

The first half moves at the pace of small town life, and this is where the film is strongest. The humiliations arrive without italics: a landlord's flinch, a form filled in with a lie, a sister whose labour pays for the education she does not get. Ghaywan is alert to the fact that oppression doesn't run on one axis. Chandan is a victim of caste and a beneficiary of patriarchy at the same time, and the film says so plainly, flattering nobody. Progress here works like snakes and ladders. Every climb is followed by a fall, and the falls get longer.

Janhvi Kapoor has limited screen time as Chandan's college classmate, but she is used precisely, as a reminder that a Dalit woman's ambition costs even more than his does. The second half, when the pandemic hits and the two men join the great walk home, changes gear. It's more urgent and more punishing, and slightly less controlled. Some viewers will feel the jolt. I thought the film had earned it. The lockdown is never staged as spectacle. It's just the final snake on the board, a catastrophe that finishes a job the system had already started. Pratik Shah's camera stays observational even when it's beautiful.

Jethwa is the revelation, all inward watchfulness under a permanently apologetic posture, and Khatter has never been better. The film played Un Certain Regard at Cannes, went to the Oscars as India's official entry, made the December shortlist, missed the nomination, and then flopped commercially at home despite superb reviews. That last fact says something about the country the film is describing.

The verdict: Humane, angry, beautifully acted, and it indicts a system without ever sacrificing its people to an argument. Essential.