Many of us (myself included) have come to rely on our smartphone apps maybe a little too much, especially ones that tell us where to go. Even in our own hometowns, we can turn to google maps or Mapquest to take us where we need to go, without paying attention to how we got there. We hear the voice say 'turn right' or 'go straight' and we absorb that. But that calming, assured voice could viewed as something deeper, and darker, if we don't understand where it comes from or how, and where, it is literally or metaphorically guiding us.
Perhaps I'm getting too philosophical, but that seems to be much of the intention behind Filipino filmmaker John Torres's latest feature, The Remotes. This is not the first time the filmmaker has explored the effect of apps on the human psyche, nor used a kind of collage style. There is perhaps some hiccups in his attempts at a more coherent narrative, but if an audience can become attuned during its more esoteric moments, there is a strangeness that can seem all too familiar.
Detective Mijares (Alchris Galura), still grieving for his late wife, has decided to emigrate away from his home on the outskirts of Manila. But first, he's assigned to investigate a series of bizarre road accidents, seemingly caused in part by a voice-guided app. Given the app's connection to a government program for retraining reckless drivers, someone needs to be held to account. This leads him to sisters Eva and Gill (Julia Richards and Gabby Padilla), themselves involved with the retraining and also grieving a recent death. The voice of the app is Eva's, and it seems to not only be giving driving directions, with bleak consequences.
While we exist in a strong visual culture, and apparently smell can bring back strong memories, we often neglect the importance of sound, especially that of the human voice. In a rare case where voice over narration works well, we hear Mijares's various thoughts on his wife, and the sparseness of his world that her absence has created. His own voice is perhaps filling the void left by his wife, filling his head with both his investigation of the case and his own musings on what his existence means without this hole in his life. In a world that is too often loud, this narration, and the sound of the voice app, seem to operate on a strange frequency, one that can only be heard by the grieving.
The film mainly moves through the night, in a small city that seems half-empty. But that feeling comes as much from a grief that does not see the people around them as from a reality, though perhaps it could be both. This is when the film shines (proverbially): finding the shadows that Mijares and those like them, with one foot in the grave of those they loved, finding solace in shadow, unable to connect with other people or the places that were formerly familiar. A discount clothing store serves as a kind of central location, seemingly strange but perhaps in that bland regularity there is a brief sense of normalcy.
Watching and listening as Eva records her voice for the app, and then listening as it evolves from mere driving guidance to life advice that is at once puzzling and quietly terrifying, gives the audience another side of the uncanny. We are both those in grief in this shadowed night, and that which stalks them. The 'meditative driving' program seems a good idea in theory; in practice, Torres sets up a room with people who seem to be entering a kind of calm death cult; it's eerie and familiar for any who have let much of their lives be guided by a technology that we don't understand yet can't seem to live without. All of the actors walk this line of strange bliss in the uncanny world in which they have found themselves existing.
This use of shadow and voice means that when the film moves into daylight, and the more formal narrative of the love story, in the last part of the film, it falters. It seems added on in a way that is neither necessary nor interesting with the majority of the film, and the daylight is harsh and takes us too far from the eerie shadows that provided detail and texture.
Part philosophy, part poetry, part mystery and romance, The Remotes perhaps stretches itself a little thin (especially with a 153 minute running time) in trying to encompass so many interpretations of its story into an experimental mosaic. But when it finds its rhythm, it is haunting and creepy in a fascinating way.