Gabriela Cartol, left, and Teresa Sánchez in The Chambermaid (Kino Lorber)

The Chambermaid thrums with anxiety beneath its sterile, stoic surface. Ostensibly a slice-of-life portrait of a maid in a high-end Mexico City hotel, Lila Avilés’s slow-burn debut film critiques capitalism as a racket where you have to run to stay in place and solidarity with others is strictly temporary.

Eva is a young woman with a shy smile, but we don’t see her face for a long time during the long opening sequence. She has her back to us as she fumbles over discarded objects in a hotel room, rootling through the bedsheets until she uncovers a shirtless man lying on the floor under the bed. We feel we might have stumbled into a Jim Jarmusch pastiche or an absurd murder mystery.

That misleading impression will fade, but the initial image of a faceless protagonist will not. Avilés uses over-the-shoulder shots and cuts off facial features out of the frame throughout, amplifying a sense of facelessness and anonymity as uniformed Eva, wearing the requisite hairnet, goes up and down elevators, paces halls, and pushes her cart through the hotel’s monochrome, claustrophobic yet endless expanses. The system treats Eva like part of a machine, but in between rooms, tasks, and shifts, Eva reveals some of her life to us.

And it’s a tough one. Eva hustles to prepare guest rooms, directed by a voice over a crackly walkie-talkie. In a capricious political landscape, bosses dangle incentives but calmly blow off requests to deliver; colleagues push side hustles and offer favors to be called in later; guests coldly issue orders. Tasks are repetitive, but one snafu can throw routines scarily out of whack. This is an airless, guarded world, and like the hardworking Eva, the film barely leaves it.

A few of Eva’s encounters offer a respite from the grind. She earns a little money by minding the baby of an entitled, ditzy, but kind-hearted hotel guest, a bubbly comic foil to the quiet maid. Eva’s careful handling of the baby lets us see the warmth denied to her own baby whom, we know from her hushed phone conversations, she has waiting at home. Later, she allows herself to be drawn out by an upbeat young teacher with whom she is studying for her GED. And a partnership of sorts may beckon with Eva’s classmate Minitoy (Teresa Sánchez), a shambling extrovert who brings a weirdly sinister touch to overfriendliness.

All these meetings offer promises of a kind, and in their own way each will come up short. Eva’s explosion of anger at unending bad news is a long time coming, and it’s a dance of rage that briefly sets her free. Special moments in life emerge to interrupt the routine of our lives, the film tells us. Just don’t believe they mean anything.