The Remnant
2019 · 17m · Canada
Directed by Navin Ramaswaran
Genres: crime, horror, thriller
A team of con artists posing as paranormal investigators robs the gothic estate of a wealthy elderly woman and unleashes a dormant malevolent spirit housed in a pagan statuette.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The con-artist-releases-actual-demon premise is the kind of perverse collision that shouldn't work but does—it weaponizes genre expectations by letting the criminals' own greed summon the thing that was supposed to be their cover story. Most scouts would dither between the heist and horror lanes; Felix doesn't care, because the friction between them is exactly the point.
Ramaswaran demonstrates formal control in the interplay between psychological thriller and supernatural incursion, though the film's tonal marriage of social engineering and occult dread risks sentiment over structure—a choice that marks ambitious reach rather than settled craft.
The tonal pivot works because of a single decision: playing the paranormal investigators' practiced patter straight even as the supernatural threat materializes, so we're never sure if the spirit or the con is the real danger—that compression of competing truths into one sustained note does the heavy lifting.