On demand: "Humans in the Loop"

They're teaching more than Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor in the film schools of India. The brisk and intriguing indie parable Humans in the Loop combines elements of Ken Loach and Koyaanisqatsi with something else entirely - and it's that something else that is perhaps the most intriguing element of all. Writer-director Aranya Sahay takes 75 minutes of your time to set up and partially resolve a most complicated situation, namely that of Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), a working mother from a lower-caste background obliged to take a job so as to secure custody of her children after separating from her husband. This would be a complicated situation in itself, but Sahay goes on to make it more complex still. The job Nehma takes involves data labelling at one of India's nascent AI hubs, a career choice presented as a possible future, but also a curious and uncertain one. Her workplace alone sparks some degree of cognitive dissonance, for this is not some gleaming, billion-dollar, architect-designed tech palace - I'm assuming Sahay didn't have the budget to build one, and would have struggled to secure the permits required to shoot at a pre-existing one - but what looks like a creaky old community centre, hastily refitted with clacky PCs; this makeshift Internet cafe is overseen by a no-nonsense matron (Gita Guha) whom you'd more typically expect to find running a church bridge night. Even before we check in with the boys at head office, you catch an air of desperation, and get a sense Nehma has been enlisted to help give human secrets away on the cheap.

Within this brave new world, our heroine is trying to raise three children at once: an adorable toddler we witness taking his first steps, an older daughter-slash-babysitter who comes to resent her mother's absence from the family home, and the stumbling, demanding, soon to be rampaging beast encoded in the machine, guzzling up human resources and knowledge alike. Like its heroine, it's a film that finds itself occupying two distinct locations simultaneously. Nehma's village offers easy access to symbolic porcupines and elephants; the more driven city fosters virtual escapism by scanning and harvesting the real world. Passing back and forth between the two generates new forms of conflict. On a nature walk, Nehma identifies a leaf-eating worm, useful within nature, which she later learns the technology intends to eradicate; the broad-brush approach to data collation deployed by her employers to get this tech up, running and profitable doesn't allow for nuance or opt-outs, and may yet enable more destruction. Sahay is one of the few contemporary filmmakers who appears entirely comfortable with integrating this tech into their dramas. More so than your correspondent, who firmly believes data centres like these should be bulldozed and salted over, Sahay retains some sympathy for AI as a concept: she has to, to make her drama work, and in return it yields a whole new set of ideas and images for her to play with. Yet she also sees AI's flaws and biases, the many risks it poses, and Humans ultimately extends a far greater sympathy to those of us having to work through and deal with the consequences of all this shiny new kit, aware that people retain a capacity for wonder - and doubt, and fear - which machines really don't. Sahay evidently has those qualities in spades; her film, both eminently timely and naggingly persuasive, does too.

Humans in the Loop is now streaming via Netflix.