Sleep Dealers

IMDb
The near future. Like tomorrow. In a world marked by closed borders, corporate warriors, and a global computer network, three strangers risk their lives to connect, break through the barriers of technology, and unseal their fates.


NYTimes
“Sleep Dealer,” the feature directing debut of Alex Rivera (who wrote the screenplay with David Riker), is an unusually thoughtful science fiction film, using the speculative energy of the genre to explore some troubling and complex contemporary issues. Set mostly in Mexico, it imagines a future in which local water rights have been snatched up by multinational corporations, and in which people connect to a virtual-reality cybernetwork by means of “nodes,” electronic jacks implanted in their arms and necks.

The film, which makes thrifty use of some basic but effective special effects, follows Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man from Oaxaca who travels north to Tijuana after the death of his father. A self-taught computer hacker, this anxious wanderer is looking for work of some kind, but also, perhaps, for vengeance. His dad was killed by a military drone defending corporate-controlled water from “aqua-terrorists.”

In Tijuana Memo meets Luz (Leonor Varela), a beautiful stranger who hooks him up with black-market nodes but whose kindness cloaks an ulterior motive.

The plot of “Sleep Dealer” is a bit thin, and the performances — the third major character is a drone pilot played by Jacob Vargas — are earnest and dutiful. But there is sufficient ingenuity in the film’s main ideas to hold your attention, and the political implications of the allegorical story are at once obvious and subtle. Mr. Rivera’s vision of Tijuana, in particular, is pointed and intriguing, an unsettlingly plausible extrapolation of what that city already represents.

Since the American border has been walled off, Tijuana, in “Sleep Dealer,” has become a magnet for migrant workers whose labor, by means of those nodes, can be exported north while their bodies stay in Mexico.

The nodes, while they allow such exploitation, also enable intoxication, intimacy and communication, both sinister and benign. Their ambiguous function is to make the worst features of this dystopian world possible, even as they make living in it somewhat more bearable.

“Sleep Dealer” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for some violence and sexuality.

SLEEP DEALER

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed and edited by Alex Rivera; written by Mr. Rivera and David Riker; director of photography, Lisa Rinzler; music by Tomandandy; production designer, Miguel Ángel Álvarez; produced by Anthony Bregman; released by Maya Entertainment. In Spanish and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Luis Fernando Peña (Memo Cruz), Leonor Varela (Luz Martinez), Jacob Vargas (Rudy Ramírez), Tenoch Huerta (David Cruz), Metztli Adamina (Dolores Cruz) and José Concepción Macías (Miguel Cruz).

Full Movie on Xmovie8