What you see—and hear—may not entirely be what you “get” in the noir-soaked world of The Remotes, independent Filipino filmmaker John Torres’s elliptical debut narrative feature. Torres, who has been called “the poet of Philippine cinema” by one film festival, has built his career around works that navigate the interstices of love, familial bonds, and memory within broader spheres of folklore and modernity. The Remotes feels like an apt distillation of his unconventional poeticism, rendered on a larger and more ambitious scale than his earlier output. But its disorientation is more than an aesthetic flourish: Torres uses fractured perspectives, technological mediation, and narrative ambiguity to explore how grief can distort our perception of reality—and how the technologies ostensibly designed to make modern life easier can instead deepen our alienation from one another and from ourselves. It may not quite represent the apotheosis of his career, but there is something about the way its disparate elements gradually sneak up on you over its sprawling two-and-a-half-hour runtime, tightening their grip on the psyche in a way that proves difficult to shake.
As I alluded to, seeing and hearing are two senses that are continually destabilized in the world of this film. On its surface, we follow a weary police detective named Mijares (Alchris Galura) as he investigates a series of bizarre car accidents in a city near Manila. Still reeling from his wife’s sudden death, Mijares’s fragile state of mind is further rattled when it is discovered that a mysterious voice app—ostensibly designed to retrain careless drivers into practising safer road behaviour—has inexplicably begun guiding unsuspecting motorists into dangerous situations instead. A connection between these incidents and the app eventually leads to a government seminar run by the Cantero sisters, Gill (Gabby Padilla) and Eva (Julia Richards), who are themselves mourning a recent loss and experiencing inexplicable disturbances of their own. As Mijares delves deeper into the Canteros’ lives and their possible connections to the strange events unfolding around the city, the boundaries of reality begin to dissolve into the freewheeling, uncompromising psychoses of unresolved grief—and the consequences of mediating that grief through an increasingly technological and automated world.
Torres gives us much to parse here while simultaneously revelling in the abstractions and absences of the world he constructs. Conventional cinematic devices such as voiceover and establishing shots are turned on their heads, deployed not to orient us but to further dislocate us through layers of obfuscation and elision. This formal strategy is crucial to the film’s larger argument: if the characters cannot fully trust what they see, hear, or are told, neither can we, and that uncertainty becomes a metaphor for a world in which human experience is increasingly filtered through technological systems whose inner workings remain opaque. And so, we are consequently forced to interrogate every perspective and subjectivity we encounter. Scenes arrive and disappear stripped of individual context, seemingly adrift within their own fractured timelines, while Torres’s camera prowls around his characters with a catlike intensity. The effect is especially unsettling when they are bathed in the shadows of night—which, as it turns out, is quite often. Even when we are left struggling to decipher precisely what we have witnessed, there is a dreamlike allure that keeps us wondering where Torres will lead us next, until the film’s labyrinthine structure gradually begins to close in upon itself. The confusion is therefore not simply something to overcome, but rather the point. Torres places us inside the same destabilized psychological landscape inhabited by his grieving characters.
Like Lav Diaz and other practitioners associated with the Philippine New Wave, Torres seeks to fuse the political and the personal, contending with the postcolonial ethos of twenty-first-century Filipino culture while anchoring his abstractions in the particulars of lived experience. The Remotes extends these ruminations toward figurations of new forms of colonial violence: rogue phone apps and supposedly “smart” technologies whose artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed toward dysfunctional and even destructive ends. The analogy is deliberately slippery, but its implications are pointed. The technologies that promise convenience, efficiency, and safety also introduce new forms of surveillance, control, and dependency, reproducing the logic of older systems of domination in ostensibly more benign forms.
The film’s dystopian undercurrents are palpable, but so too is its humanism. Strip away the narrative enigmas and ambiguities, and at its heart are broken people in the throes of loss, tending to hearts shattered by unexpected deaths. Their grief leaves them vulnerable to the nefarious machinations of modern technology, but Torres does not treat that vulnerability as a personal failing. Instead, he suggests that the more profoundly we outsource our perception, decision-making, and emotional lives to systems we cannot fully understand, the more vulnerable we become to forces beyond our control.
This is ultimately what gives The Remotes its peculiar emotional power. Torres’s technological anxieties are inseparable from his meditation on grief: both involve the uneasy experience of surrendering control over something we desperately want to understand. His characters search for explanations, patterns, and connections in the wake of devastating loss, only to encounter systems that offer answers without necessarily offering meaning. The film’s fractured structure mirrors that condition, refusing the consolations of a stable reality in much the same way that grief refuses to follow a coherent narrative.
Yet this is not a cold or unfeeling world that Torres unfurls. The film’s midnight gloom is periodically pierced by fleeting bursts of tenderness, offering a striking—and at times genuinely enchanting—counterpoint to its otherwise sombre reveries. Those moments are essential because they prevent Torres’s critique of technology from becoming merely dystopian. For all its paranoia about automation and artificial intelligence, The Remotes remains fundamentally concerned with what cannot be automated: mourning, intimacy, memory, and the need to connect with other human beings. Beneath all its narrative slipperiness and surreal dislocation lies a quietly devastating proposition: in a world increasingly mediated by machines, the most radical act may be to remain vulnerable to one another.
The Remotes does not simply interrogate whether technology is changing the way we live. It also asks salient questions about what happens to our capacity for human connection when we allow technology to determine how we see, hear, remember, and grieve.
The Remotes had its world premiere at TIFF in the Wavelengths programme on Friday, September 11, 2026.
The Lonely Film Critic 