The promise of much modern technology is that it will make our lives easier and take some burdens off our shoulders. An AI chatbot can tweak your emails; a delivery service can spare you the walk to a restaurant. But when does wanting to let go of something burdensome cross into giving up control? In John Torres’s , grief, control and technology ominously intertwine on dark roads near Manila in the Philippines. A fast favourite of this year’s film festivals, it is a stunning and transfixing film that disorients and enthralls in equal parts.

Told in four parts, each of which feels as intimate as if some of its footage were documentary, follows detective Mijares, who is trying to solve a series of car crashes where drivers’ bodies seem to have been controlled by a mysterious app. “You saw a ghost again,” a colleague tells him early on, except that the ghost once lived on the app store. “Were you fully in control of your body?” Mijares asks an older woman as she sits in her car after an accident. Something has clearly gone wrong here, and Torres builds a sense of a supernatural unease and visceral dread from the film’s first frame.

Notably, Mijares is not only haunted by this nearly unbelievable case, but he is also grieving his late wife. He narrates this grief as much as he narrates the case, through an often-poetic voiceover, until the film shifts focus to two sisters. Eva and Gill Cantero run seminars for delinquent and unsafe drivers. The ghost in the sisters’ lives is their dead mother, but they are also spectres in Mijares’s investigation; in their seminars drivers use an app that tells them how to drive, sometimes in a kind voice, sometimes sternly. In one emotionally resonant scene, after the seminar the students gather over drinks and recount how nice it is to drive with the app and listen to the voice, how good to temporarily relinquish control. The narrative threads start to intertwine, and Torres hints at something like resolution. A few scenes show motorcyclists explicitly losing control of their limbs once they punch into the app; Mijares seems to be vindicated and the sisters indicted.

But Torres isn’t interested in quick or easy conclusions and most of isn’t told in order. Even though the film is over 2.5 hours long, parts of the story seem to be deliberately left out. This moodiness and nonlinear quality make the film both impactful and, at times, also deeply frustrating. As the connections come together, some of the emotional punches of that convergence are dulled by the sheer difficulty of following the story. I found the cinematography incredibly beautiful and pleasurable, but I also really wanted to pull out a notebook and try to sketch out a timeline. In a room full of critics and journalists at the New York Film Festival, I got a sense that I was meant to understand the story by feeling it more than by understanding each beat of its plot.

Though challenging, Torres’s commitment to lingering in this uncertainty and discomfort is also what recommends the most. This is the feeling of grieving, and it is also the feeling of living in an uncertain world, one where we are constantly inundated by information and choices with inscrutable consequences. The increasing number of documented cases of people turning to AI chatbots for advice or tragically ending up in a state of psychosis after spending too much time talking to one speaks to how – much like in – the temptation to offload some responsibility and control on a technology that talks back is very real.

In all its knottiness, this film is a good reminder to think about it twice, maybe even to say no to ghosts in the app store more often.