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.
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