Kaouther Ben Hania’s dark satire presents a knowing tableau of exploitation: how the savvy use the weak, privileged Europeans dangle favors before undocumented outsiders, and mainly how Westerners take advantage of Middle Easterners uprooted by regional war and repression. Visually textured and richly shot, the film has earned Tunisia’s first-ever Academy Award nod for International Feature Film. But like many social problem films, it falls short of the emotional impact it seeks: a certain flatness limits its scope, perhaps appropriate given the superficial, fashionable art milieu in which a large part of it takes place.

A Syrian in his late twenties, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni, whose angular features appear expressively wounded under a frizz of chestnut hair) is crazy in love with Abeer (Dea Liane), a young woman from a higher social class who is very pretty and supportive and whom the film doesn’t give much of a personality. However, on a train, Sam’s off-the-cuff remark to Abeer about a revolution attracts menacing attention from the authorities, and he has to leave Syria fast or face jail time. His only hope is to reunite with his love, now spirited away to Belgium by her parents and married to another, richer man.

Sam is desperate, and an answer to his prayers arrives in the form of a nasty, nihilistic art celebrity, Jeffrey Godefroy (beady-eyed Koen De Bouw, wielding a more intellectual Simon Cowell vibe). In the time-burnished tradition of art pretending to seriously consider human misery but actually just trendily name-checking it, Godefroy aims for a grand political statement by inscribing a huge tattoo on Sam’s back of the coveted entry document to Europe, the Schengen visa. In return, Sam will be exhibited as a tableau vivant with the freedom to travel in Europe—and perhaps the chance to reconnect with Abeer. Handlers led by Jeffrey’s loyal henchwoman, Soraya (Monica Bellucci), coach Sam to display his back to gawkers and watch his every move. Is this bizarre arrangement a path to freedom, or a trap of its own?

The scenario is apparently based on a real art-world event, but its twists, turns, and takedown of a greedy and amoral marketplace don’t itch with the uncomfortable grit of real life. Metaphors of Sam’s objectification pile up in handsomely framed shots of his toned torso without venturing much more than the obvious, and the turnabouts in the story feel hasty. Sam starts out the movie naïve and stays that way, yet the film oddly allows more character development for Bellucci’s secondary character, who is revealed to be a little kinder than her art-world toady persona suggests.

Befittingly cynical, The Man Who Sold His Skin depicts man as wolf to his distressed fellow man. We just don’t feel the constriction and danger as much as we should.