Isa 2014

Isa Reyes is a high school student on the cusp of graduation with plans to study computer science when a sudden car accident changes everything. At the hospital, doctors uncover a foreign object lodged in her brain that radiates a faint signal, hinting at an unseen layer to her life. That night, Isa dreams she is being driven home by her late parents, and her mother insists there was no accident. When she awakens within the dream, she stumbles into a vault and discovers a glowing golden cocoon. Meanwhile, Isa’s phone quietly transmits a signal to two engineers in Mexico who are monitoring the dream from afar, and their interpretation of the dream as a “break-in” triggers a reboot of their system, jolting Isa awake as she clutches the cocoon that appears in her hands.

In the waking world, a brilliant but enigmatic scientist, Dedal, reports the break-in to a shadowy banker known as Mr. Gros, vowing to retrieve the mysterious chip embedded in Isa’s brain. Dedal dispatches a loyal enforcer named Borroso to track the people Isa mentions in her dream and to secure the technology she believes is valuable. When Borroso zeroes in on the chip’s origin—a high school student—the scientist concludes that the so-called break-in was carried out by “one of the children” she has been experimenting on, which deepens the mystery surrounding Isa.

Borroso pays Isa’s school a visit and shows her a doctored video that doubles as an evoked potential test for those who carry the chip. The footage is designed to provoke a response, and Isa unintentionally taps into a dream-state where her chip activates and links to the scientist’s system. As the scientist observes Isa’s unconscious activity, Isa unravels fragments of her real past by following a monarch butterfly that leads her back to Mexico. The scientist becomes convinced that Isa was stolen from her lab as a child, and she recognizes that Isa’s chip has evolved into a powerful asset that could greatly benefit the banker.

The trail grows clearer when Isa discovers a photograph from a recent dream on her phone. Confronting her adoptive aunt and uncle—aunt Tia Maria and her uncle, who reveal they are not truly related to Isa and that she was smuggled into the United States as an infant—the young woman realizes there is a hidden history tied to her birth. Fueled by this revelation, Isa decides to run away, interpreting the dreams as coordinates guiding her toward a possible homeland in Michoacán, Mexico.

Borroso acts quickly and abducts Isa, connecting a cable to her head so the scientist can download the advanced software embedded in her brain by forcing Isa to relive her most terrifying nightmare. Yet Isa refuses to surrender to the nightmare, reframing it as a memory of her father who saved her from the scientist’s lab and sent her into the care of migrants to protect her life. This reinterpretation becomes a turning point that allows Isa to endure, resist, and regroup.

Back in Borroso’s lair, Isa materializes a swarm of hundreds of monarch butterflies, a surreal defense that disorients her captor. In this moment of danger and ingenuity, Isa’s friends step in to help: Officer Jaime Diaz and Nataly assist in the escape, lending their courage and practical support. The scientist’s ambitions catch up with her when the shadowy banker exacts punishment for the takedown of the system, a move that reverberates through the global stock market and reveals the high-stakes power dynamics at play.

Across these tense sequences, Isa’s journey remains centered on identity, belonging, and the uneasy intersection between memory and technology. The film threads together the personal stakes of a young woman who believes she is uncovering a hidden past with the larger implications of her brain-embedded chip—an asset that could upend lives, corporate interests, and the balance of power in a world where memory and machine converge. In the end, Isa’s resilience—combined with the help of loyal friends and unlikely allies—points toward a path home, even as the echoes of her past continue to ripple through the present in unpredictable ways.