Film

“I got a job,” Memo (Peña) says. “I think it’s somewhere in California.” After his father is murdered on live TV by the U.S. military, our hacker hero leaves the family farm for “city of the future” Tijuana, where Mexicans in factories labor for Americans through a virtual interface. (“Sometimes you control the machine. Sometimes the machine controls you.”) A writer (Varela) takes a more-than-platonic interest in Memo’s endeavors, but can he trust her? Once all its cards are on the table, this near-future dystopia—involving alternate realities, cyberterrorists, memory sales and media overload—may have you experiencing total recall.

Rivera isn’t out to ponder the nature of existence (or eXistenZ). Sleep Dealer is primarily a show of slick technique, and its visual wizardry shows promise. But apart from a few offhand touches—such as having a customs agent outsourced from India—the underwritten story suggests a more benign version of one of Paul Verhoeven’s media satires. If that sounds oxymoronic, it plays that way. The shaggy-dog finale suggests that the film’s cosmology was never fleshed out. Sleep Dealer is impressive but unsatisfying—a bit like jacking in to an audition tape.