The Remotes

From Viennale

Despite two decades as a major pillar of the Southeast Asian independent film scene—working as an artist, as a producer with the collective Los Otros and, of course, as a director of several features—John Torres has slyly described THE REMOTES as his first “real” film. While hardly a traditional policier, sci-fi or film noir, despite shadings of each, the self-assigned designation seems predicated on the film’s engagement with the tools of mainstream narrative cinema. Working with an elevated toolkit, including professional actors, industrial scale crew and a script, Torres nonetheless employs each element in service of a unique slow burn. Shot over several years and structured into three chapters, the languid, forking plot swirls around a mourning detective (Alchris Galura) and two mysterious sisters (Gabby Padilla and Julia Richards) who are drawn into each other’s orbit through connections with a driving app ostensibly designed as a tool for social betterment that turns out to be more nefarious than it seems. Despite Torres’s leap in scale, his film never sacrifices the human at the core of his work, offering a sprawling, affecting reflection on grief and the insidious nature of technological creep. (Jesse Cumming)