When Homebound premiered at Cannes this yr, its stillness spoke louder than spectacle. Directed by Neeraj Ghaywan and backed by Dharma Productions, the movie, starring Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, and Janhvi Kapoor, opens with two buddies ready for a police entrance examination in rural North India. They sit quietly, one scrolling by way of a cellphone, the opposite misplaced in thought. The silence between them carries the unstated heaviness of caste, ambition, and stalled goals. It’s a second that doesn’t use any music or motion; it simply lingers. And that’s what makes it vital—not simply as a movie, however as an indication of change.
Bollywood, lengthy recognized for its flashiness in visuals, feelings, and scale, is starting to borrow the tone, rhythm, and soul of impartial cinema. The shift is not only about field workplace numbers or platform releases. It’s a few deeper change in how tales are informed and why. As Ghaywan reflects, “I needed to make a movie that breathes, that permits silence to talk, and that trusts the viewers to really feel with out being informed.”
This tonal shift is an indication that even mainstream cinema is now beginning to belief subtlety. The rising embrace of author-driven storytelling discovered its most world affirmation in 2024 with All We Imagine as Light. Directed by Payal Kapadia and made exterior the normal studio system, the movie gained the Grand Prix at Cannes 2024, making historical past as the primary Indian movie in three a long time to compete in the principle competitors. However its significance goes past the award. The plot follows the internal lives of two nurses in Mumbai with a type of atmospheric tenderness that’s not often seen in mainstream cinema. Regardless of its deliberate pacing and lack of spectacle, it struck a chord with audiences and critics alike, proving that deeply private tales rooted in realism can resonate on a world scale.
There are additionally movies like Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, which commerce melodrama for emotional nuance through the use of pauses and glances as a substitute of sensational monologues. Arjun Varain Singh, who directed the Netflix launch, says he needed the movie to feel like a time capsule. “One thing that captures what it means to be 25 proper now—all of the insecurity, the efficiency, the longing,” he tells Rolling Stone India. The result’s a narrative the place the emotional weight comes not from scale, however from statement—a trademark of indie filmmaking. Singh calls it “a business film with an indie soul,” and it exhibits in how the movie listens greater than it speaks.
That sparseness additionally slips into the way in which these movies look. Indie cinema has lengthy relied on parts like pure gentle, actual houses, and unpolished places—not due to funds constraints alone, however to honour the areas the place these tales really come from. Kiran Rao’s small-budget manufacturing Laapataa Ladies embraced this totally. Shot on location in rural India, with a forged of largely contemporary faces, the movie felt textured and true. And regardless of the plagiarism accusations, its success, each crucial and business, proved that visible restraint just isn’t a limitation—it’s a language. One which audiences clearly perceive.
One other main change is in narrative construction. As an alternative of the neat arcs and dramatic crescendos that Bollywood typically favours, we’re seeing extra elliptical, open-ended tales. Movies like Sir, Masaan, and Ship of Theseus—all impartial in origin—led the way in which in displaying how life not often wraps up in climaxes. That affect now echoes in studio-backed movies which can be keen to finish with ambiguity. Poulomi Das, a movie critic, factors out examples just like the movie Sardar Udham, which she says didn’t chase a patriotic excessive, however as a substitute “reframed patriotism as grief.” “That’s not one thing you anticipate from a mainstream biopic, however it labored as a result of it didn’t attempt to carry out the emotion—it simply held it.”
This results in a fourth shift: a stronger give attention to lived expertise over plot. The place earlier movies typically constructed characters round occasions, at present’s rising tales are constructing occasions round emotional truths. The Lunchbox, launched in 2013, provided an early glimpse of this, utilizing a single misdelivered tiffin to discover emotions of loneliness and sudden connections. That inwardness—emotional fairly than situational—is now being taken severely by bigger manufacturing homes. Even movies like Thappad function inside home interiors, but really feel huge of their emotional impression. These aren’t occasion movies. They’re felt in movies.
The sooner perception that viewers wanted fixed stimulation now not holds true. Movies with slower pacing and emotional nuance—like Pagglait or Kaamyaab—discovered loyal followings on streaming platforms as a result of they didn’t cater to consideration, however merely revered it. Nancy Beso, a producer recognized for indie movies just like the Naga quick Angh, says, “Folks hook up with tales that really feel sincere. They’re uninterested in being informed what to really feel. They need to really feel it themselves.” This shift in viewers sensibility is what offers this second weight. It’s not simply that filmmakers are taking dangers—it’s that viewers are displaying as much as meet them midway.
However not all imitations are honest. Poulomi Das factors out that Bollywood typically borrows from indie cinema however sidesteps its danger. “Bollywood is nice at copying the vibe—the muted colors, the hand held digicam—however not often the emotional or artistic danger,” she says. She factors to the movie Superboys of Malegaon as a latest instance of this. Loosely primarily based on Faiza Ahmad Khan’s documentary Supermen of Malegaon, the function movie recreates the setting and magnificence, however not the guts. Within the unique, Nasir isn’t chasing success or recognition—he’s making movies for the pure love of storytelling.
That singular ardour, as one review noted, will get overshadowed within the function, which provides scripted conflicts and handy resolutions. The movie, decided to be a feel-good story, wraps every thing up neatly for viewers applause. It succeeds in leisure worth, however in doing so, it dilutes the very spirit that made the unique so shifting. It turns into an instance of what occurs when the indie aesthetic is lifted, however the indie impulse is left behind.
But when a movie like Homebound—starring recognized faces, produced by a legacy banner, and distributed on a world platform — can nonetheless really feel quiet, uncertain, tender, and deeply private, then one thing is altering. Maybe for the primary time in years, Bollywood isn’t chasing indie cinema to mimic it, however to grasp what makes it keep.
What makes a movie really feel impartial isn’t its funds or forged. It’s the rationale it exists. Is it formed round reality, or round pattern? Was it written to be felt, or to be optimised? The perfect of this new Hindi cinema carries these solutions not in statements, however in its silences. And in a tradition that has so typically equated scale with significance, the quietest tales may simply be those rewriting the long run.