DIFF 2025: Khooh Wala Ghar Review | Of Dust, Debt & Love’s Faint Flicker

Khooh Wala Ghar (Room At The Farm, 2025) is a short film directed by Jasmine Kaur Roy and Avinash Roy. The film had its India premiere during the Dharamshala International Film Festival and has also screened at the International Film Festival of South Asia (IFFSA), Toronto. Kaur Roy briefly shared with Outlook how the conception of their film came about: “While researching for a documentary on the concept of home, we stumbled upon people and stories that needed to be told, so we took the idea of our narrative feature from there.”

Khooh Wala Ghar revolves mostly around a farm property in rural Punjab and two spouses who have recently tied the knot. The film unfolds like a quiet lament on inheritance, survival, and the muted vocabularies of love. At its centre is Nihal (Guru Bamrah), a young farmer who seems both son and ghost of the futile land he tills. The anxiety of losing his land erodes his sense of identity, consuming his interior life up to the point that affection, desire, or tenderness appear indulgent. He is unable to physically leave the farmland to even go home at night. Like Reet (Vrinda Malhotra), his new wife, the audiences are compelled to question the basis of his attachment to the house. She probes him but he refuses to enlighten her with any answers. Thus, she becomes collateral in this slow erosion. She appears trapped in the same loop of endurance for the price of love. 

Cinematographer Sachin Gadankush weaves the wide farmland against the minuscule frame of Nihal’s body quite masterfully. The earthy colour palette of the film contrasts with the futility of the themes it attempts to capture. The heavy smog, grass blades and the wreckage of the old home adds a certain emotional texture to the visual language as well. The fear of losing one’s land is about losing everything: history, roots, and the sense of belonging. Nihal’s devotion to it resembles a form of worship that requires sacrifice, and the first casualty is his emotional life.

He can’t love when he feels emasculated. He is married to the soil first, and Reet becomes secondary. The farmhouse is thus his god, his punishment, and his inheritance. The sound design and music by Vivek Sachidanand and Meghdeep Bose lace the film with an unexplainable grief that hovers over the film like the looming threat of the eventual surrender of land to development endeavours like factories. 

When Nihal drinks and sings of soil and impermanence, “The world is a transient affair, all will to turn to dust,” the film gives us a rare keyhole into his consciousness. To Nihal, life’s brevity has stripped all meaning from material pursuit. Yet, paradoxically, he is bound to the most material of responsibilities: land, debt, survival. The film suggests that Nihal’s predicament is cyclical. He is “like his father,” who was “consumed by the farm.” The emotional gravity of generational trauma remains largely abstract, at least onscreen.

Without flashbacks or visual motifs, the audience must imagine his father’s slow undoing through Nihal’s restrained behaviour. The absence of a backstory works as a metaphor of loss but also risks alienating the viewer from Nihal’s psychology. We grasp what he represents, but not entirely who he is. Reet, too, is written as a vessel of quiet endurance—her interiority implied, but never explored. The dialogues between them, written by Kaur Roy, render the film with a lived-in complexity that thrives between expression and composure quite thoughtfully.

The film is also an exploration of different love languages. Reet’s gestures of love are practical, and rooted; when she knits him a scarf, resembling the colour of her yellow salwar kameez, it is an extension of her love and home she wants to build with him. Yet, by marrying Nihal, she too becomes part of the soil’s economy of suffering, despite having the clarity of his eventual destiny. Male suffering here is portrayed as sacred silence, while the woman’s endurance becomes invisible labour. 

The most haunting moment arrives with Nihal’s return gift—the glowing miniature Taj Mahal he buys from a city shop. He is told it is a “symbol of love.” The gesture is tender and tragic precisely because it is misinformed. It exposes the lamentable irony at the heart of Nihal’s existence: his first act of romantic communication is through an emblem of mortality. Yet, both are acts of love within their limited vocabularies. Their blossoming union, though strained, finds expression through unequal, contrasting gestures. The tragedy is not that Nihal fails to love, but that he has fatefully inherited a language of love rooted in death, dust, and transaction.

On one level, the gift marks progress: Nihal’s attempt to reciprocate emotion, to participate in the exchange of intimacy that Reet initiates. On another, the glowing dome is a replica—a cheap, electric imitation of grandeur. The Taj Mahal, constructed from the earth’s materials—returns as a small, glowing effigy that embodies the very tension between earthbound devotion and consumerist desire. Perhaps it is all that Nihal can offer her; a symbolic luxury amid his own financial deterioration. Or perhaps the film uses the miniature Taj Mahal to mock the myth of eternal love—reducing history’s grandest monument to a trinket sold by the roadside, its sanctity eroded by commerce.

Reet, though hurting, eventually begins to understand him. Spousal support should come both ways but largely, the burden of compassion is expected and generated out of Reet, the woman, more than Nihal. The suggestion is that love is not just accepting a loved one when they are vulnerable, but also accepting them when you don’t quite yet fully understand them. In its twenty-three-minute duration, the film attempts to portray how the house becomes an extension of the self—a generational reality for many Indians—but it could have delved deeper into the gravity of those themes. Good acting often lies in restraint more than expression, and the film’s protagonists, Bamrah and Malhotra, carry the entire narrative wonderfully with their spousal dynamic. Their delicate see-saw between internal emotion and external expression is remarkable to witness on screen.

The house’s history and the inner worlds of Nihal and Reet seem to hover just beyond the audience’s grasp, beautifully suggested but never fully realised. The result is a film that thinks profoundly about class, land, and inheritance; yet, occasionally feels emotionally restrained, like its brilliant actors.