Homebound review – emotionally rich study of friends in rural India trying to get home in the pandemic

Neeraj Ghaywan's film benefits from excellent lead performances, strong cinematography and an apparent mentorship from Martin Scorsese

Having screened earlier this year at the Cannes film festival, this Indian drama has already drawn inevitable comparisons with All We Imagine As Light, an Indian film at Cannes the year before - but they are only glancingly similar. Payal Kapadia's woozy, dreamy, femme-centric tale was primarily an urban-set story sprinkled with magical realist fairy dust. This is a much more four-square, on-the-nose, realist work about impoverished young men from a rural northern Indian town struggling to get ahead, and loosely based on a New York Times story published in 2020.

But director Neeraj Ghaywan, whose 2015 debut Masaan was well-regarded, has a fairy godfather in Martin Scorsese no less, who apparently mentored Ghaywan through the script development and editing. Who knows who is responsible for which choices, but the end result is pretty damn good. It's an emotionally rich study of friendship that ought to play as a bit syrupy given the story, but the musical score, usually very to the fore in more mainstream Indian films, has been smartly stripped down to let the excellent lead performers and strong cinematography bring the drama on their own.