Immigration. Deportation. The border. These words dominate every headline and dinner table argument right now. So when a film arrives using a cross-border love affair as its lens into privilege and placement, the timing should be perfect. It’s not.

Michel Franco’s Dreams stars Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain as Jennifer McCarthy (so, yes, Jenny McCarthy), a socialite who runs her family’s foundation and oversees a ballet school in Mexico City. There she meets Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a young dancer whose talent catches her attention in ways that go well beyond charitable interest. Their affair ignites fast and at the start of the film we see him making the covert journey across the border. Arriving at her oasis of an apartment, we see that she’s well aware that he’s risked it all and snuck across the border to be with her. She might even like that part. But the moment Fernando pushes for something real, Jennifer’s carefully curated life starts to crack.

Franco has explored power imbalances before in New Order and Sundown, and his previous collaboration with Chastain, Memory (which won lead actor Peter Sarsgaard the Volpi Cup at Venice though Chastain gave the far better performance), at least had a moody patience to it. Dreams abandons patience entirely. After a promising first fifteen minutes, the film nosedives into repetitive graphic sex scenes and clumsy confrontations that feel less like storytelling and more like a director testing how far his lead actress will go.

And Chastain (The 355) goes far. Too far, frankly. Not because there’s anything wrong with on-screen sexuality when it serves the story, but because here it serves almost nothing. She and Hernández share a scene of dirty talk so painfully unconvincing I was embarrassed for both of them. Chastain doesn’t need to prove she’s committed. She’s one of the best working today. But she’s always been the theater kid who shows up an hour before rehearsal and leaves last, and sometimes that instinct leads her places the material doesn’t earn.

Hernández, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, has the receipts for movement. His dancing is athletic, graceful, and commanding. His Swan Lake audition, though received through a somewhat ludicrous set of conveniences, is one of the film’s few genuine pleasures. But the acting is another matter. Watching him try to find chemistry with Chastain in real time is awkward in ways that occasionally work for the power dynamic but more often just feel stiff. Rupert Friend (Jurassic World: Rebirth) is nicely greasy as Jennifer’s brother Jake, and Marshall Bell (The Bling Ring) brings kindly aloofness to their father. I appreciated that Franco gives the ruthless card solely to Friend, letting Bell play a lighter register.

Cinematographer Yves Cape gives Dreams crisp, handsome visuals, drawing real contrast between Jennifer’s privileged California existence and Fernando’s life in Mexico without reducing either to a postcard. Production designer Alfredo Wigueras fills every frame with architectural detail that invites interest. But Franco, who shares editing duties with Óscar Figueroa, leaves in far too much material without purpose, especially the sex scenes that don’t deepen character so much as provide another excuse for both leads to disrobe.

Though Dreams was written and completed well before ICE ramped up its current efforts, I’m not giving it a pass for being this tone-deaf. This material has been handled in better, smaller films aiming far lower. That Dreams aspires to art while finding diversion in flesh instead of feeling is a huge disappointment. Franco has now proven across three films that he can take fully committed actors and waste them completely. Chastain delivers a gutsy performance in a film that doesn’t deserve her bravery.