The Human Surge is ambitious in intent, and recently earned a prize at the Locarno film festival. When it (finally) ends, it does leave behind ideas worth pondering. But, for me, there is something exasperating in the way it withholds the pleasures of film from its audience, allowing long stretches to unfold with no lighting and semi-audible dialogue. It could be that the director has fallen under the hazardous influence of Pedro Costa, that supremely challenging auteur.

The film is about the apparent instant globalised contact offered by the web, but also suggests that the internet is just another commodity unavailable to developing nations, and that young people, the “digital natives” whose identities are inextricably linked to the web, are a universal underclass: digital serfs.

The film starts in Buenos Aires, where a bunch of guys are staging livestreamed sex acts in a basement for money. Then we move to Mozambique, where a bunch of other guys watching them are doing much the same thing. Via a surreal closeup vision of ants (are these humans nothing but ants?), the camera burrows through the Earth’s crust to the Philippines where a sweatshop factory is finally shown making smartphones and tablets; an unearthly robotic voice repeatedly and ironically intones “OK!” in a production-line rhythm. The film’s two transitions between its three acts are perhaps its nodal points of interest, but it appears radically disengaged from the lives it places onscreen and, though arguably appropriate for a film about alienation, it is also weirdly defeatist and unrewarding.