A review of Dharma Productions’ Homebound for Screening Minds
With Muted Healing being a mission to create safety in the world – I get to enjoy the vagueness and generalisability of that statement. I needn’t box myself into one service or product, because safety should be infused into everything right? But what if your entire life was reduced to one box, where that box becomes both your identity and your prison?
This question haunted me throughout Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, a film that transforms Basharat Peer’s New York Times essay “Taking Amrit Home” from a specific lockdown tragedy into a broader examination of how institutional categorisation becomes psychological imprisonment. Set in India during the global COVID-19 lockdown, we follow Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter), a Muslim, and Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa), a Dalit, as they pursue police jobs, not just for employment, but for the dignity they believe institutional status will provide.
Reflect: How many forms have you filled out this year? Did you pause to consider which boxes you ticked? Which ones felt safe to claim?
The film’s central metaphor, life confined within predetermined boxes, operates on multiple psychological levels. When we categorise people by caste, class, religion, or gender, we’re not merely organising society; we’re creating what psychologists call “cognitive schemas” that limit both how others see us and how we see ourselves- schemas as rigid as the checkbox categories on government forms that determine housing, education, and opportunity.
Yet what makes Homebound extraordinary, and a necessary medicine for Bollywood’s recent anti-Muslim rhetoric, is that it emerges from Dharma Productions, the popular house that gave millennials wholesome family entertainers. Here’s proof that commercial cinema can choose healing over hatred.
Reflect: When you meet someone new, what’s the first “box” you mentally place them in? What would happen if you resisted that impulse?
Brotherhood as Revolution
The film opens with Shoaib and Chandan fighting to board a train to the Police Assessment Centre, their friendship representing something radical in contemporary India: solidarity across difference. Their bond challenges the colonial “divide and rule” psychology that keeps oppressed communities fighting each other rather than confronting systemic inequality.
What moved me most was the film’s refusal to engage in “Oppression Olympics.” Despite exploring discrimination through caste, religion, and subtle patriarchy, we never see grand dialogues about who suffers more. Even when highlighting how Chandan enjoys privileges his sister Vaishali doesn’t, it’s done with tender humanity rather than accusatory lectures. Around Eid spreads of biryani and pickles, two families break bread together, a soothing balm for souls weary of division.
The real fight isn’t between marginalised communities; it’s about understanding privilege’s uneven distribution and how it operates across all our identities.
Reflect: Think of your closest friendships. Do they challenge the social categories you were raised to maintain? What boundaries have you crossed, or avoided crossing?
The Weight of Inherited Struggle
“The ones who came before us fought for us and we have to fight for those ahead of us,” declares Sudha (Janhvi Kapoor), capturing the psychological complexity of inherited struggle. Her words encompass both past trauma and future possibility—how each generation carries forward pain while planting seeds of change.
I witness this legacy transforming in my therapeutic space weekly: countless tears as clients loosen their ancestors’ grips and grab new ropes of hope and abundance, ones less confining than the squares dictating life chances.
This resonates with research I conducted on navigating non-heterosexuality with religious beliefs. One participant described the strangeness of finally ticking “bisexual” after a lifetime of hiding in the “heterosexual” category for safety.
Reflect: What boxes did your ancestors tick out of survival? What boxes do you tick today out of inherited fear rather than authentic choice?
The Dignity Trap
The boys’ desperate pursuit of police jobs illuminates a crucial psychological trap: believing institutional employment equals dignity. As Shoaib observes, “If educated people like you are fearful to speak up, then what chance do I have?” revealing how “respectable” work becomes another form of control.
I lived this truth during eight years as a high school teacher. My working-class, migrant parents found immense pride in my institutional employment, eventually at the cost of burnout, mental health, and confronting the institutional racism woven through every workplace structure. (There is still no comparison between my experiences and that of Shoaib’s/Chandan’s.)
Reflect: What institutions have you sought validation from? What did that pursuit cost you, and what did it promise that it couldn’t deliver?
Motion as Liberation
“To hell with your constitution”– though uttered by a parent angry about Chandan’s mother serving school meals, if you flip the voice it comes from- it represents every voice suffering under systems that promise protection while perpetuating harm. It’s the psychological breaking point where cognitive dissonance resolves into clarity about systemic betrayal. Indeed, to hell with your double standard laws. It begs the question, what will it take to change a culture.
And it took both protagonists, a lot of waiting time, and a sobering argument for them to realise that when the world does not have space for you, you have to create the space.
Chandan’s reflection about a ball’s “actual identity” when flying versus lying “dead” on the ground serves as the film’s psychological centerpiece. The metaphor extends beyond individual agency to collective movement—literal (their journey home) and metaphorical (their pursuit of dignified mobility).
I felt this deeply when deciding to resign and create my own workspace rather than accept institutional crumbs. Yet the film’s lockdown sequences provided an uncomfortable mirror of privilege, a stark reminder that while I had the luxury of choice, countless others face Chandan and Shoaib’s reality without such options.
Reflect: When did you last feel truly “in flight”, authentic and free? Is your exercising of this free flight, the homage that your ancestors deserve for their struggles?
Breaking Out of the Box: What We Owe Each Other
From Peer’s original essay about “two men in a touching display of humanity” to Ghaywan’s cinematic vision, Homebound suggests that psychological liberation begins with seeing beyond the categories that divide us. The film doesn’t offer easy solutions but demonstrates that authentic human connection can exist even within oppressive systems.
A Call to Conscious Privilege
Here’s what Homebound demands of us: honest reckoning with our own boxes, the ones we tick, the ones we avoid, the ones we’ve never had to consider. The film reminds us that every checkbox represents someone’s reality, someone’s limitation, someone’s dream deferred.
But there’s profound hope here too. In Shoaib and Chandan’s friendship, in Sudha’s wisdom, in every moment characters choose connection over division, we see blueprints for a different world. A world where safety doesn’t require hiding, where dignity isn’t rationed through institutional gatekeepers, where the boxes we tick expand rather than confine us.
Your turn to reflect: What privilege do you carry that could become a bridge rather than a barrier? How will you use your freedom of movement—literal and metaphorical—to help others find their wings?
The most radical act isn’t just breaking out of our own boxes, it’s ensuring others have the safety to break out of theirs. In a world increasingly obsessed with building walls, Homebound reminds us that our liberation is interconnected. When we choose solidarity over separation, when we amplify voices rather than silence them, when we transform inherited trauma into collective healing—that’s when the revolution truly begins.
The question isn’t whether change is possible. The question is whether we’re brave enough to be part of it.
Author’s Note: While the central themes, selections of quotations, anecdotes, and personable language are all the author’s own, the use of AI aided the structuring of this review to support flow and reader experience.