Writer/director Ben Hall’s Remote follows Gabriella (Geliani Perez), a grieving employee offered an off-the-record reset by the same company that signs her paychecks. After the death of her fiancé, Gabriella is struggling to maintain some kind of life balance. In hopes of turning things around, her company, Artificial Analytics, lets her work remotely from the company cabin. She heads for the secluded house expecting peace and quiet, but the “help” waiting inside feels more like a system with its own idea of what recovery should look like.
When Gabriella arrives, she realizes the company has strings attached to keeping her employed. In what they call “work therapy,” Artificial Analytics has devised a program that helps employees recover from their trauma while remaining productive. Upon entering the cabin, Gabriella is greeted by AL, a stationary artificial intelligence home assistant designed to help manage the space and support her routine. Each day, she continues her job while checking in through video calls with Dr. Kate (Sharon Powell), the therapist who oversees the program and guides Gabriella through short “micro-dosing” sessions. What Gabriella does not realize is that her sleepwalking habit has followed her to the cabin.
“…a shadowy figure appears in her dreams, becoming more real with each passing night, blurring the line between dreams and waking life.”
As Gabriella settles into the isolated environment, the traumatic visions that plagued her in the city begin again, stronger than before. Soon, a shadowy figure appears in her dreams, becoming more real with each passing night, blurring the line between dreams and waking life. As the days pass, Gabriella begins to question whether the visions are the result of grief and exhaustion or whether something connected to the company’s experimental therapy program is responsible for what she is experiencing.
Hall says he wrote Remote after a heavy stretch of personal loss — “a dozen close friends and family members” dying over two years — alongside the broader losses of the COVID-19 pandemic. The filmmaker fed these real-world issues directly into Gabriella’s grief and emotional instability. Tangentially, he also notes the sudden rise (and potential threat) of generative A.I., which plays into questions about mortality and finding purpose in life. The thriller explores the isolation everyone experienced during the pandemic and wonders how artificial intelligence could be used to manipulate us or make us pawns for a much more sinister force.
Perez is great. Her charisma pretty much carries the entire movie and juggles grief, isolation, and paranoia perfectly. Though I thought the film would lean more toward the horror side, it’s a psychological thriller in which AL is the equivalent of our Alexa or Google Home devices. with a corporate agenda behind it. I love the cabin-in-the-woods setting, along with a mystery to be solved.
By the end of Remote, you’ll be asking all sorts of philosophical AI questions and thinking about the isolation we went through as a nation. Can we ever truly find normal by unplugging from everything and everyone? Or is it a conflict we were never meant to fight alone?
Remote is available on Prime Video.
"…Perez is great."
