I’ve been a fan of Julio Torres’s for years, ever since a friend introduced me to the joys of Patti Harrison and I got into that whole crew. Los Espookys was a lot of fun, and I was excited to hear about his directorial debut when it originally premiered at SXSW last year, in 2023. It took some time for it to make it to my local theater, but I was excited to see that not only did it hit the mainstream multiplex nearest me, but that there was a surprisingly dense group of people in attendance at my Tuesday night screening, and it got a response from everyone there. 

Alejandro (Torres) is the son of a Salvadoran artist, and many of her designs for public art features came from his imagination, made manifest by her. As an adult, he’s living in a nightmare NY apartment situation and attempting to break into his dream job, as a toy designer for Hasbro. Unfortunately, despite his application to their “talent incubator program,” which included such designs as Cabbage Patch Dolls that have smartphones and the attendant anxiety that comes with such devices, slinkies that simply refuse to go down stairs, and a Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her back (instant drama in the dream house), he has not been selected. Instead, he makes a meager living at a cryogenic facility, where he is assigned to a particular corpse, Bobby (RZA), a painter who was focused on one particular subject: eggs. Bobby’s been frozen for over twenty years, and his art critic wife Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) is fed up with the ever-increasing cost of his “care.” When Alejandro is fired for a workplace accident—one with zero consequences—at roughly the same time that Bobby is to be moved to a smaller, less expensive part of the facility that does not accommodate his paintings, he latches onto the idea of helping her put together a show of Bobby’s work, as she needs the help and he needs an employee sponsorship in order to remain in the U.S. She agrees, but Ale quickly realizes that he’s bitten off more than he bargained for. Elizabeth is, it turns out, an erratic, defensive, bitter, verbally abusive narcissist, perhaps the exact evil monster his mother foresaw him encountering in a dream. 

Swinton’s performance here is utterly phenomenal, and Torres’s directorial and narrative choices that make her alternatively demonic, sympathetic, and delusional are pitch perfect. There are countless tiny details about Elizabeth that build a portrait of a very particular kind of person, one whom all of us have encountered at some point. When she’s sold on something, she’s devoted to it to the point of nearly psychotic loyalty, as evidenced by her obsession with using FileMaker Pro, a three decade old computer program, in order to maintain continuity across all of her databases. She’s hit a point of technological arrested development, and her frustration is made the problem of everyone else around her: Apple phone service agents for whom explaining how to find her photos on her phone is a daily occurrence, Ale for having to learn software that might be older than he is, and everyone who crosses her path and is blinded by her smartphone’s flashlight, which is always at full blast. She’s a classic evader, as she deflects any and all attempts to rationalize with her by changing the subject to one of her other countless complaints, and she has no appreciation for how her apathy toward signing his sponsorship documentation keeps him in a perpetual state not just of anxiety but of danger as well. 

Alejandro is her perfect foil in addition to being her assistant and, in some ways, both her student and her teacher. The details are best left discovered through a viewing rather than recited here, but the plan to be saved from deportation via Elizabeth’s sponsorship fails … but not before she empowers him to achieve not just his short-term goal of staying in the country, but his larger goals of sharing his ideas with the world through his toy creation. When he was a boy, Alejandro’s mother never limited his dreams in the slightest, and instead of that making him a selfish, demanding adult, it’s made him a soft-spoken sweetheart, and through learning to stand up to Elizabeth and break through the barrier she’s built between her reality and the world at large, he grows. And, having witnessed (and received) countless rants and diatribes from Elizabeth, he learns that this is rarely the best way to resolve a situation; there are instances in which it’s the only way to resolve it, though, and he uses this new wisdom to not only make sure that he receives credit for his ideas, but to secure a future for himself. The film has already provided an alternative happy ending by creating a path for him to stay in the U.S., and in a more realistic movie, we would likely have seen Ale accepting the job as a translator from his immigration lawyer and we would end the film with his next year’s submission to the Hasbro incubator program. Instead, Alejandro goes for broke and so does Problemista, to my delight. 

If you haven’t seen the movie or any of its advertising, then this probably sounds like a fairly straightforward plot description, since I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about the film’s touches of magical realism, other than a brief mention of Ale’s mother’s dreams about his future. In the dream, she sees her son approaching a darkened cave, the depths of which are completely occluded other than two glowing red eyes. Elizabeth becomes that monster, dragon-like, but when Alejandro breaks through her self-deception forcefield and gets her to take an opportunity to show Bobby’s paintings despite it being “beneath” her, he appears in that imagined cave wearing a child’s toylike idea of a chivalric knight’s armor, besting her. Alejandro imagines the thirty day grace period he has to find sponsorship for his employment visa as an upturned hourglass, set amongst hundreds of other such devices, and he sees a woman fade from existence in front of him at the lawyer’s office when her time runs out. And, when he is forced into a series of degrading, quick, for-cash Craigslist jobs, the website is personified as a living being (Larry Owens) that presents him with opportunities for food delivery, handing out hair care product advertisements, and, ever present as a last resort, “Cleaning Boy (kink).” 

There are a myriad of effusively captured smaller roles here as well. Torres’s partner James Scully, of You and Fire Island fame, is ironically cast as Ale’s nemesis. The perfectly named Bingham is a white, New England landed gentry layabout whom Elizabeth is asked by a friend to take on as a secondary assistant, and whose effortless WASPy sycophantism charms her. There are hints throughout that Elizabeth may owe what meager success she had in her critical career to her aggressiveness and self-delusion more than to her eye for art, and although I don’t know that this makes her “shallow” necessarily, she’s positively wooed by Bingham’s surface level blaséness and taken in by him, to the degradation of her working relationship with Ale. One couldn’t ask for a more perfect narrator for all of this than Isabella Rosselini, whose soft enunciation of Torres’s script creates just as much magic as the visuals, and as a fan of Killjoys, it’s always exciting to see Kelly McCormack out and about in the world, even if her appearance is brief (but memorable!). My favorite appearance, however, was from Greta Lee, who appears briefly as Dalia, a former protegee (and more) of Bobby, who is in possession of Blue Egg on Yellow Satin, the final painting needed to complete his posthumous(?) show. She’s an utter delight to see here, and she makes a big impression despite her relatively short screen time. 

This is my favorite movie that I’ve seen so far this year, and I couldn’t have been happier that I ended up in a less-than-ideal seat at the theater because there were so many other people already there. There was a constant undercurrent of pure joy that rippled throughout, and it proved that it had something for everyone as groups of various ages released giggles, laughs, and even the occasional chuckle, all over different bits and jokes. (One thing that we could all agree on: Torres’s eccentric running style never got old.) I loved this one, and if you have enough joy in your heart, I think you’ll love it too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond