Humans In The Loop review: A heartwarming parallel of AI and humans that reflects on the fragility of identity and its censorship!

Aranya Sahay’s Humans In The Loop is that rare gem of a film which, while being an earnest take on AI, reminds us that liberation comes from being in your truest, most natural form.

Every day, new debates around AI surface online whether it’s the fear of job loss, our growing co-dependency on it, or most crucially, how it slowly works toward erasing the human from the process. Marketed as a tool for efficiency, it fits neatly into the hustle economy. But what happens when efficiency comes at the cost of identity? Look at the “Ghibli debate” where AI-generated art mimics Studio Ghibli in seconds. Why wait years for something painstakingly crafted when a tool gives you instant gratification, right! Isn’t the very struggle of bringing an idea to life, its sweat, delay, and imperfection exactly what makes it meaningful? AI threatens to rob us of that, replacing the human journey with automated shortcuts. That looming fear of erasure sits at the core of Humans In The Loop, which tells its story with rare emotional connect and tenderness.

Divided into chapters at the center is Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), an Adivasi woman from Jharkhand’s Oraon tribe, who has moved to her village after a divorce, raising her two children, a 12-year-old Dhannu (Ridhima Singh) and one-year-old Guntu, while working for an AI company. Her job is rather simple, yet quietly monumental. Much like many tribal women from Jharkhand now employed in the AI industry, Nehma is tasked with feeding data to the machine, building it from scratch. From tracing skeletal body maps to labeling objects in images, she teaches AI how to see and know. Almost like a child in its blank-slate stage, the system cannot recognize or label until something is carefully fed into it. And in that way, her labor echoes motherhood itself because AI here is treated as someone to be nurtured as it cannot grow on its own. The parallel is striking as Nehma is a single mother who shoulders the burden of caring for both her children and this infant like AI. The metaphor could have felt too literal, but the film makes it its strength. Because Nehma isn’t just a mother or a worker, she is a divorced, marginalized woman fighting the erasure of her identity by patriarchal standards so deep-rooted that even her daughter doubts her worth.

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And yet, Nehma resists. She provides, nurtures, and teaches whether by painstakingly holding onto custody of her children or taking Dhannu into the forest, showing her how nature provides and demands care in return. Raised among caves and porcupines, Nehma understands instinctively that what you feed to a child or a machine shapes what it becomes. Feed the wrong thing and it grows up wrong. The film layers this mirroring beautifully as a pest nibbling away rotten parts of a plant is paralleled with Dhannu, who acts like a pest for her mother but simply is a child searching for the right data to grow. And Aranya Sahay builds this mirroring metaphor as its storytelling language without making them heavy-handed as we also see Guntu’s first steps mirror the AI learning to walk, collapsing the rift between mother and daughter. Sonal and Ridhima bring lived-in performances as Sonal’s face, often held in close-up, speaks volumes without a word, while Ridhima balances confusion with curiosity in a tender portrait of adolescence.

Yes, Humans In The Loop portrays the paradox of humans reduced to machines training machines to be human. But within this endless cycle, it discovers liberation in the wild open jungle with dense trees, in carved cave walls, in skies where birds move in formation, in the rootedness of sweet potatoes and the oddity of porcupines. For Nehma and Dhannu, returning to ancestral roots becomes both a coming-of-age and a refusal to let the world erase their truest selves in a world built to monetise on robots. Because AI, whether we like it or not, is inevitable. The question is not whether it will exist but how we will teach it. If we feed it only standardized things, it will erase everything that doesn’t conform. But if we feed it the richness of tribal beauty, local histories, of identities too often ignored, it might just reflect something closer to home. And isn’t that what representation of humanity really means? Maybe we need it in AI just as much as in the world!

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You can watch Humans In The Loop releasing this month in select theatres near you! 

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