Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer both benefits from and is hindered by its ungainliness, which is most welcome in its synthesis of sci-fi elements into a recognizably down-and-dirty reality, and less appreciated in its rickety, exposition-heavy plotting. Set in the near future, Rivera’s saga concerns Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), whose Mexican farmhand father continues to pine for a life (of self-sustaining agricultural autonomy) that never materialized, stolen as it was by American conglomerates that – in response to a global water shortage – dammed up the local river in order to sell agua to the population at a high cost. Desperate to escape his circumstances, Memo retreats into eavesdropping on global telecommunications via a homemade radio and satellite dish, which gets him into trouble when he’s spotted spying on a corporation that, in response to this intrusion, has a military drone blow up his residence and, as bad luck would have it, his dad too. Grief-stricken, Memo flees to Tijuana, where beautiful stranger and aspiring writer Luz (Leonor Varela) helps him acquire “nodes” – computer sockets for one’s body – and, consequently, a job at a “sleep dealer,” a firm where Mexican workers plug into a mainframe in order to remotely operate manual labor machinery in the States.

Northern Mexican immigration is Rivera’s clear allegorical concern, one aided by a stark vision indebted to both The Matrix and – in a related thread about Luz’s online sale of her memories about Memo – Strange Days, and yet given unique enough context to stand on its own. In Memo’s attainment of nodes, and his career as a virtual laborer controlling robots on a San Diego skyscraper construction gig, Rivera’s story speaks plainly and eloquently to the dehumanization of economic exploitation. While it’s a subtext that barely qualifies as “sub,” Memo’s sleep dealer toil proves a potent snapshot of desperate people allowing themselves to be taken advantage of for a (relatively) reasonable price. It’s a situation given additional resonance by Rivera’s visually arresting conception of the sleep dealer, a giant cylindrical room where individuals are hooked up like marionettes to neon-blue cables, don milky white digital contact lenses, and drowsily mime movements in the air. The disconnect between body and mind, real and unreal, man and metal becomes manifest in these striking images, the flesh transformed into merely a cog in a distant machine – a portrait of the commodification of humanity that’s mirrored by Luz’s treatment of her day-to-day memories as merely retail goods to be manipulated for peak market value.

Rivera’s low-budget special effects aren’t seamlessly integrated into his authentic urban and rural landscapes, but that disconnect not only has a cheesy charm, but winds up softly augmenting his larger depiction of personal and societal detachment. Alas, whereas his aesthetic is a pleasingly clunky blend of old and new, his script falters in its address of its larger issues, as well as in devising a suitable conclusion. Characters’ fondness for talking about “crossing borders” and “seeing,” and saying things like “Anybody can connect,” make the director’s points explicit in a far less clever way than does mock TV show “Drone” (a Cops-style reality program that revels in clips of computer planes blowing “the hell out of the bad guys!”). Compounding this lack of subtlety are further storytelling missteps, highlighted by a strange refusal to parallel (and thus denounce) Luz’s exploitation of Memo’s odyssey with the global economy’s own mistreatment of him, an oversight that undercuts the film’s critique of modern First World-Third World economics. More problematic still, however, is Memo's eventual relationship with the pilot (Jacob Vargas) who murdered his father, a team-up that culminates in an unconvincing finale whose hopefulness seems not only fanciful but, when viewed on the story’s own terms, woefully short-sighted.