‘The Remotes’ Review: John Torres’ Sci-Fi Noir is an Unshakable Film About a Sinister Navigation App

The Philippine New Wave filmmaker's first narrative feature is a gorgeous, frustrating, addictive mediation on grief and national history.

I have a bad habit of scratching my left hand, on the skin between my thumb and fore finger. I will claw at it without realizing, convinced of an itch that is not there. I will scratch until the skin is thin and inflamed and pulses with my heartbeat. It began after my friend died and has not gone away. Fifteen minutes into John Torres’ “The Remotes,” which had its world premiere at TIFF, I looked up from my raw red hand to catch the line: “Ma’am, does your body move on its own?” It felt like I was being watched.

The question wasn’t for me. It was for an elderly woman, who sat knitting in her car not a dozen feet away from the dead body in a parking lot. The voice came from Detective Mijares (Alchris Galura), a man still grieving the death of his wife in a car accident one year prior. These are his last few days on the job before emigrating to someplace, a place with snow.

But until then, there’s only this small, unnamed island town outside Manila. The infrastructure, both literal and bureaucratic, has fallen into disrepair. But there are still roads. There are still vehicles that crash on those roads. Reckless drivers are enrolled in a seminar, wherein an app trained on grief hotlines retrains students via voice commands as they drive. Mijares enrolls in the service, convinced it holds the explanation to a string of automobile-related deaths, and perhaps even his wife’s passing. 

The seminar is run by the Cantero sisters, Eva and Gill. Gill (Gabby Padilla), has spent her life afflicted by intermittent possession, sleep-walking while still awake. The app’s voice came from Eva, a real-estate influencer in her free time (played by actual realtor and content creator Julia Richards). She is trying their mother’s house. Their mother is dead. Eva sounds like their mother.

The voice is different for everyone. For some it is nagging, and others it is gentle. For some it sounds like a ghost, and for others it sounds like the internal monologue of a better version of themselves. The one unifying trait is that is beckons all users to surrender their mind and body. Driving with the voice feels nice. It’s relaxing, to give up control for a while.

The world evoked by Torres in “The Remotes” is its greatest, most foregrounded gift. It is tempting to experience the film as a kind of highway hypnosis. In an era where rudimentary color theory and center-framing will be lauded as cinematographic excellence, here is a film that is truly beautiful. It is a joy to stare baffled by an image, only to be struck by the revelation of its contents. The speculative fiction elements here are really strong; I love the house that changes colors when a phone connects to the speakers implanted in its walls, and I love the detached steering wheels lined with RBG lighting that the student use under Eva’s tutelage. 

Director John Torres dedicated “The Remotes” to his mother, who, prior to her passing, would ask him when he would make a real film. Torres, multi-hyphenate artist and co-runner of the Manila-based experimental filmmaking hub Los Otros since 2003, has produced his highest-budget, most accessible film to date. A veteran of the Philippine New Wave, his latest is his first narrative feature, a police procedural with practical gore and plot twists. 

Don’t be fooled by the concrete back-alleys and neon lighting – “The Remotes” has little in common with Neo-noir; rather, it is a straight-up Hawkesian melodrama. The script is densely plotted, with lots of narrative doubling, ulterior motives, and supernatural activity. No matter its ultra-modern preoccupations, it would not feel out of place in some possessed, witching-hour broadcast from TCM.

Still, the movie is clearly removed from convention. The filmic grammar here is sparse and deceptively subtle, even though its world-building is frequently blunt in its metaphor. Torres asks the audience to reverse-engineer the machinations of its plot from the semiotic fractures in its own mise-en-scene. At over two and a half hours, it is a demanding sit. Despite its languid pacing and vivid atmosphere, he has crafted an intellectually rigorous picture.

There are many viable political readings in the film: AI psychosis, the extrajudicial killings in Durterte’s War on Drugs, manufactured consent under a surveillance state. This is a world where senseless death is met with indifference and denial, where postcolonial trauma manifests in deferred hauntings, people forced to shoulder the full weight of a grief that is not their own. The dead live on in the blouses and belts sold in resale warehouse, in dirty Pyrex containers and delisted mobile apps. Every inch of the film is so evocative, both individually and cumulatively, that it is addictive. In the days after first seeing the film, I would scrub through specific scenes I could not fully untangle the first time around. Each time, I was convinced that this scene or that would provide some information I had missed. Each time, I emerged only with even more tangential lines of inquiry.

“The Remotes” is an inscrutable film, to a degree that is only partially intended. It wants you to get lost. I had many questions while watching it and not all of my questions had worthy answers. Still more had no answer at all. Torres’ style, which leans heavily on inference through montage and poetically repetitive voice-over, muddles the water between surreality and specific developments in Mijares’ investigation. Characters echo one another’s words, consciously and unconsciously. Several poems by Arkaey Kierulf appear in narration as if they are the thoughts of the characters themselves. The film is non-linear, though which scenes are featured out of chronological order are a mystery until well past their appearance.

This ambiguity is deliberate and compelling, but it defangs the emotional core of several moments, especially towards the end, as your brain once again reshuffles scenes into the correct piles. A romantic subplot between Eva, the voice, and Donnie, a violent motorcyclist played Enchong Dee, resolves both the mystery and the text’s underlying psychoanalytic perversions quite plainly. It is conceptually sound to merge noir and avant-garde, but the implementation here is frequently dissatisfying.

I have been tormented on how to “grade” a film like this. Is it good? Sure, though I have significant, load-bearing reservations about its construction. Moreso, it is a film that I am grateful to have seen. Most of the time, writing about a film can bring a sense of closure to my relationship with the art, at least temporarily. In contrast, “The Remotes,” is a false itch on my hand that I will keep happily keep scratching.

Grade: B

“The Remotes” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.