Alex Rivera’s debut feature takes place in the Mexican city of Tijuana, near the heavily-fortified border with the US. It’s a crowded urban sprawl, where migrant workers gather, selling cheap labour to big corporations based up north. There are reports of water shortages from the surrounding countryside. And on TV tabloid-style infotainment is shown round the clock, presenting the latest dispatches from US government’s ongoing war on terror.

It may sound familiar, but this spiky, dystopian sci-fi projects contemporary concerns into an all-too plausible version of the immediate future. Our hero is amateur cyber-hacker Memo Cruz, who flees his desert home when his father is killed by the US military, wrongly identified as member of an “aqua-terrorist” group plotting to break into the privatised water reservoir. Landing in Tijuana, he has some high-tech nodes implanted into his body and joins a so-called sleep dealer factory – a futuristic sweatshop where low-paid workers plug into machines to perform jobs remotely in the first world at a bargain-basement rate.

With a vision of the future shot in today’s bustling Tijuana streets – a blur of neon colours and corrugated-iron shanty towns, where Mariachi bands pedal contraband cyber technology and denizens of all-night bars plug into vending machines offering virtual escapes – Rivera’s thriller is as visually distinctive as it is gripping. And with the nervous systems of workers like Memo directly connected to the economies of the West via their implanted nodes, he provides a compelling image of the relations between labour in the developing and developed worlds. It’s little wonder that Memo’s thoughts soon turn to revolution...

A spirited combination of Paul Verhoeven, David Cronenberg and Naomi Klein, this wildly inventive debut is science fiction for our era of globalisation.