Remote
2017 · 2m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Andrew Lavery, Mathew Rees
Genres: family, horror, mystery
On Christmas Day, a small child receives a fantastic remote-control car as a gift from a loving grandmother. Joy fades fast when the toy seems broken, although behaviour suggests otherwise.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a kid's Christmas morning could've been treacly sentimentality, but Lavery and Rees flip the script into something genuinely unsettling—the remote car itself becomes the uncanny protagonist, and the 'broken toy' premise does the heavy lifting of a full-length psychological thriller.
The tonal restraint here is masterful: whimsy and dread sit side by side without announcing themselves, placing the work in a lineage of children's horror that knows subtlety is more potent than spectacle—a formally disciplined piece that earns its genre credentials.
What makes this work is the decision to let the camera follow the toy's movement and logic rather than the child's reaction—that single formal choice transforms a straightforward gift scene into genuine ambiguity, doing more narrative work with a toy car and 120 seconds than most shorts manage with ten times the runtime.