Immigration and ICE have been largely at the forefront of news over the past few months, so when John Wildman asked me to review a few films for FestWorks, I knew that Ryan Prows’ darkly prescient Lowlife would be one of the films worth rewatching.

Lowlife premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal almost a year ago, and after playing a few other festivals, it was given a fairly low-key release by IFC Midnight in early April. Three months later, it’s a movie that feels even more relevant and timely now than at the time when it was first released.

Directed by Prows, it’s the result of a writing collaborative dubbed “Tomm Fondle,” made-up of Prows, Jake Gibson, Tim Cairo, Shaye Ogbonna and Maxwell Michael Towson. Ogbonna is the only member of the group who does double duties in one of the acting roles.

On the surface, the movie’s title seems clearly meant to label a Taco Shack owner named Teddy “Bear” Haynes (Mark Burnham), who uses the surplus of illegal immigrants as unwilling organ donors and sex slaves. Despite the opening title credit sequence that shows Teddy disposing of some of those immigrants, Lowlife isn’t the grim crime-drama some might expect, being more of a mélange of genres with varying degrees of humor.

Lowlife follows an eclectic group of characters over the course of a single day in Los Angeles, including a famed Mexican wrestler (or luchador) named El Monstruo (Ricardo Adam Zarate), his pregnant wife (Santana Dempsey), a motel owner named Crystal (Nicki Micheaux) desperate to save her ailing husband Dan, and a pair of incompetent criminals (Jon Oswald and Ogbonna) who see their friendship tested in bizarre ways by the conflict created by Haynes.

The first segment is called “Monsters.” Mostly in Spanish, it focuses on El Monstruo, the latest in a legacy of luchadors to bear that name who works as an enforcer for Teddy. After telling his story in Spanish, we get a display of his powers whenever he’s angered, which is quite frequently. Monstruo realizes his people have certain expectations for their hero that he isn’t living up to, but Teddy’s given him so much, including his adopted daughter Kaylee (Dempsey) as his wife. Although there’s a tragic aspect to Monstruo’s woes, Zarate delivers his lines in a deadpan manner that ends up feeling more humorous.

The second segment “Fiends” is about hotel manager Crystal and her attempt to get a kidney to save the life of her husband Dan (King Orba). She’s also in debt to Haines, having sold her own daughter to Teddy when she and Dan were junkies. Now grown up, Crystal’s daughter is the perfect organ donor, but there are moral hurdles Crystal needs to overcome.

By the third segment “Thugs,” we have no idea what to expect, and this is when the film ventures so much further into the realm of comedy, it’s likely to give you whiplash. Randy (Oswald) has just been released from prison, being picked up by his best friend Keith (Ogbonna). Randy is white, Keith is black, but you wouldn’t know it from the way Randy acts. And while in prison, someone tattooed a swastika on Randy’s face, something that’s not likely to go over well in their neighborhood. The two of them have been leveraged by Teddy to kidnap Crystal’s estranged daughter, but their incompetence in such a simple task is nothing short of hilarious.

Got all that?

Despite knowing the above, Lowlife still manages to be one of those rare movies where you never know exactly where it might be going, or how all those disparate characters might be connected. It’s a movie about desperate people being put to great lengths. Each segment works as its own short film with a different tone and genre, which makes how things come together even more astounding as you learn more about how everything is connected. Maybe a writing collective like this was necessary in order to keep track of everyone while also delivering the type of impeccable original dialogue we rarely see in first-time features.

“Teddy” Haynes is more than just a slimeball racist crime boss taking advantage of a system that allows people to fall between the cracks, but similarly, there’s a lot more to Randy than being a white guy trying to act black while bearing a swastika tattoo, not by his own choice.

It’s also good to remember that Lowlife was made over a year ago, so its precognitive abilities to foresee the state of our country with ICE becoming almost as big a menace as the alt-right is nothing short of amazing. (The actual ICE agent in Teddy’s employ only plays a relatively small part in the story.)

It might be hard to tell which of Prows’ ensemble cast might inevitably be dubbed an “overnight sensation” years from now, but Nicki Micheaux is certainly a standout as shown by her featured segment and her role in the film’s climax. Oswald and Ogbonna are quite an amazing comedic duo who likely could anchor a series of buddy comedies, but it’s even more shocking that Mark Burnham hasn’t gotten more character work, although he did play a major role in Quentin Dupieux’s similarly-eclectic Wrong and its “sequels.”

It’s true that Lowlife is very dark, and it offers enough violence and gore to placate the most diehard of genre fan, but it’s also something different from anything else you will have seen, shot on the grungiest of real locations, while building up to a terrific action-filled climax. It’s the work of a group of writers who clearly don’t give a flying F about being PC by today’s standards, and Lowlife thrives for it.

At times, it might leave you with a similar feeling as when you first watched Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs or even Pulp Fiction, because you’re watching the work of filmmakers who are clearly meant for bigger things. I haven’t a clue what Tomm Fondle has planned to follow Lowlife, but when a film has such a unique vision, you inevitably want to see and know more about the men behind the movie.

Lowlife will hit DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Platforms on August 7, so if you somehow missed it during its festival run or in theaters, you’ll have a chance to check it out for yourself.