🤖Humans in the Loop — A Mother, a Machine, and the Meaning of Connection

💻 “When a machine learns from us… what does it really learn?”

In the quiet villages of Jharkhand, far from the glimmering glass towers of Silicon Valley, lives Nehma — a single mother, a data labeler, and unknowingly, a teacher to artificial intelligence. Humans in the Loop, directed by Aranya Sahay, is not just a film — it’s a hauntingly poetic reflection on humanity’s invisible labor in building the digital future.

Now streaming on Netflix, this 2024 Hindi-Kurukh-language drama explores what happens when the human heart and machine intelligence begin to mirror each other — imperfectly, painfully, and beautifully.

🌾 The Story: A Mother, Her Child, and Her Algorithm

Nehma, played with quiet brilliance by Sonal Madhushankar, spends her days labeling images and voices for an AI company — tiny tasks that fuel massive systems. At night, she returns home to her daughter Dhaanu (Ridhima Singh), whose growing independence and questions mirror the algorithms Nehma trains.

As she works, she begins to notice something eerie — the machine she’s teaching starts reflecting her own biases, her own exhaustion, and even her tenderness. But the world around her doesn’t see her. Her supervisors treat her as another “input,” and her child struggles to understand her emotional absence.

Through Nehma’s journey, the film asks: Can love exist between a woman and a world that only measures her worth in data?

⚙️ A Story Rooted in Real Lives

Humans in the Loop is inspired by journalist Karishma Mehrotra’s acclaimed article “Human Touch”, which explored the invisible workforce behind AI systems — especially women from rural and marginalised communities who perform the labor that machines can’t.

Director Aranya Sahay transforms that idea into a deeply emotional, cinematic experience — a story that’s as much about motherhood as it is about machine learning. Her lens captures the clash of modernity and tradition, code and culture, empathy and efficiency.

🎭 The Cast: Faces of a Silent Revolution

• Sonal Madhushankar as Nehma — delivers a moving, grounded performance of resilience and vulnerability.

• Ridhima Singh as Dhaanu — the daughter caught between childhood and technology, innocence and awareness.

• Gita Guha as Nehma’s Supervisor — a complex portrayal of authority within the system.

• Vikas Gupta, Prayrak Mehta, and Anurag Lugun — complete the ensemble that brings raw humanity to this mechanised world.

🧠 Themes: Bias, Belonging, and the Future of Care

At its heart, Humans in the Loop is not about artificial intelligence — it’s about emotional intelligence. It explores the biases that live in both humans and machines, and how marginalized communities often carry the burden of progress without recognition.

The film questions:

• Who teaches the machine what is “normal”?

• What happens when those defining the data are unseen, unheard, and undervalued?

• And can technology ever understand the complexity of a mother’s love?

The film doesn’t offer easy answers — it offers reflection.

🎥 A Visual Language of Silence and Signal

Cinematographer Aneesh Kumar paints the film with muted colors and intimate lighting, contrasting Jharkhand’s lush landscapes with the sterile glow of Nehma’s computer screen. The editing rhythm mirrors the mechanical repetition of data labeling, interrupted only by moments of raw emotion — a child’s cry, a power cut, a whispered lullaby.

The sound design hums with subtle electronic tones, reminding us that even silence has data.

💬 “Machines learn from us. But maybe… we need to learn from them too.”

This line, spoken softly by Nehma near the film’s end, lingers long after the credits roll. It’s a statement on empathy — for her child, for her work, for herself.

🌍 A Story for Our Time

Humans in the Loop isn’t just one woman’s story — it’s a mirror held up to our global dependence on invisible workers who make the digital world function. It bridges Jharkhand and the world, reminding us that every app, every AI, every dataset — has a human behind it.

The film premiered in Indian theatres on September 5, 2025, before finding its global audience on Netflix (October 31, 2025) — where it continues to spark conversations about ethics, empathy, and equality in tech.

❤️ Conclusion: Humanity, in the Loop

Humans in the Loop is not a loud film. It’s quiet, observant, and unflinchingly honest — like Nehma herself. It reminds us that in a world rushing toward automation, human emotion remains the most powerful algorithm of all.

So the next time your AI completes your sentence, remember — somewhere, someone like Nehma helped it learn how.

Watch “Humans in the Loop” — streaming now on Netflix. Because behind every smart machine, there’s a human heart still beating. 💔🤖