Vague Visages’ The Calf Doll review contains minor spoilers. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

In Ankur Hooda’s Haryanvi-language debut The Calf Doll, a dead calf sets in motion a crisis in which grief collides with the demands of survival. What begins as a practical problem on a small farm gradually opens onto the larger pressures shaping rural life, where loss cannot be separated from work, livelihood and economic necessity. The film captures this world in its unvarnished forms via routines, absurdities, indignities and moments of unexpected beauty.

Part of The Calf Doll’s appeal lies in the narrative’s simplicity. In Dayalpur ( a village near Faridabad, Haryana), Satbir Singh Hooda (playing himself) is a retired professor who now tends to his small farm. His helper, Dabbu (Dheeraj Kumar), tells him that their only cow has given birth to a stillborn calf before leaving for the city in search of work. The mother cow stops producing milk, turning what initially seems like an ordinary misfortune into a personal and economic crisis. Satbir eventually turns to a forbidden rural practice, fashioning a doll from the dead calf’s hide and placing it before the mother in the hope that she will begin producing milk again.

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Hooda does not present the ritual as an exotic curiosity. The gesture is practical as much as emotional, rooted in the belief that the cow’s grief prevents her from lactating. What makes the ritual so unsettling is the way it turns mourning into a necessity. The dead animal is remade into a body that denies its absence, and the calf is put back to work rather than buried or ceremonially remembered. Satbir’s relationship with the doll thus becomes a piteous depiction of a man caught between the biological fact of death and the economic reality of change.

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The treatment of the film occupies an uncertain space between documentary and fiction. The result is a docudrama that moves from the particulars of one family’s predicament toward larger questions about loss, labor and the human impulse to make meaning from what cannot be undone. At intervals, poem-like text appears over black screens filled with simple illustrations, introducing a note of surrealism into Hooda’s otherwise observational texture. These interludes reinforce the film’s folklore-like quality, while residents of the village, including the director’s own grandparents, appear as versions of themselves. The situations retain the texture of observation even as they are shaped into a constructed narrative.

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Satbir’s predicament is inseparable from a rural economy being reshaped by modernization. As younger generations leave for the cities, aging farmers face increasing pressure from middlemen and commercial interests. The cow is both an object of attachment and a household asset, making the decision to sell it deeply personal. Satbir’s wife (Chameli Devi), is more pragmatic about the economic realities he resists, yet Hooda never reduces his protagonist to a victim. Rather than relying on exposition or confrontation, he builds the character through gestures and repetitions — tending to animals, working the land, watching younger people leave and trying to recover what has already disappeared.

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Anish Sarai’s cinematography gives The Calf Doll a striking physical presence. Fog often envelops the village, making the landscape seem enigmatic. His camera, meanwhile, attends to the textures of everyday life — the surface of a field, the movement of an animal, a solitary figure driving a pink-colored Scooty through a thick layer of smog. At moments, these images seem to elevate the material world to a transcendent plane, where the familiar acquires an almost otherworldly presence. Yet the village is neither idealized nor romanticized. Sarai frames the setting and its characters with a spatial depth that infuses these ordinary locations with a quiet intensity.

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Bigyna Dahal’s sound design gives the film an uncanny pulse. The distant rush of trains, the calls/movements of cattle and the small sounds of Satbir’s daily labor continually seep into the soundscape. These intricate, layered sonic textures often seem to precede or outlast the images that produce them, extending the bucolic setting beyond the frame while quietly introducing a surreal presence into it. The effect is hypnotic rather than merely atmospheric. Familiar sounds acquire an almost eerie presence, giving the film’s poetic reflections an elusive quality as it drifts between the material world of work and a more intangible realm of memory, anxiety and loss.

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Hooda’s editing is unhurried, with shots given enough time to breathe and scenes unfolding without narrative haste. Images of trains, cattle and wide fields return throughout the film alongside the slower rhythms of village life. These recurring images gradually establish a sense of a landscape being altered, with the rhythms of rural existence increasingly encroached upon by the forces of modernization. As the scenes unfold at their own pace, their juxtaposition offers a clinical depiction of human fragility, with their plodding rhythm underscoring the vulnerability of those caught within these circumstances.

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The characters play versions of themselves, giving the performances an unforced quality. Hooda, as an aging farmer with few avenues left open to him, conveys both the weight of the ritual he undertakes and the burden that accompanies it. Devi, as the protagonist’s wife, brings an even-minded sensibility to the role, grounding Satbir’s impulses in the economic realities of their life together. Kumar brings a quiet ambivalence to Dabbu, who leaves for the city with a sense of regret. His TikTok videos later reveal a more animated version of him, and hints at the complicated emotions surrounding his departure.

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Through its interplay of documentary attentiveness and fictional invention, The Calf Doll finds a strange beauty in a landscape caught between agrarian rhythms and industrial expansion, where the struggle to preserve a livelihood becomes inseparable from the desire to hold on to a vanishing way of life. Blending the tangible with the uncanny, Hooda invites viewers to look beyond the immediate circumstances of one family’s predicament and consider what it means to remain attached to a world being reshaped by modernity.

Dipankar Sarkar (@Dipankar_Tezpur) is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic based in India. As a freelancer, he regularly contributes to various Indian publications on cinema-related topics.

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