Anyone who has been lucky enough to enter the magnanimous mind of Julio Torres can tell you things are a bit different over there. Over the past decade, the comedian, writer and performer has made a name for himself via his singularly surrealist approach to humor, first as the resident avant-gardist on Saturday Night Live’s writing staff and then as the iconoclastic creative behind HBO’s Los Espookys and My Favorite Shapes, his stand-up special that doubled as an artistic contemplation on, yes, his favorite shapes.
Though Torres has been building his cinematic universe for some time now, no work he’s completed has as clearly expressed his ethos as his new film, Problemista, which he wrote, directed and stars in. The story centers on a young immigrant from El Salvador who works at a cryogenics lab that keeps the deceased frozen under the promise that one day they can be revived. That job connects him with Elizabeth (played by a stellar, terrifying Tilda Swinton), a fearsome arts critic and the widow of an artistic hopeful, Bobby (RZA), whose kitschy paintings of eggs were spurned in his lifetime and whom Alejandro is tasked with tending to in his frozen state. After Alejandro is unceremoniously fired from the lab, he makes a deal with Elizabeth: he will help her retrieve all of her late husband’s egg paintings and curate a show around them, and in return she will sponsor his visa.
It’s clear, early on though, that such a task will be anything but straightforward, as Alejnadro’s journey takes him through the byzantine American immigration system (depicted as a literal maze in the film) and a freakazoid New York filled with ominous characters, such as an imaginary, grimy Craigslist monstress (Larry Owens), and Bingham (James Scully), a gay nepo baby who threatens Alejandro’s perilous position with Elizabeth. Overlaid on this bizarro New York is the ticking clock of Alejandro’s immigration status, which is fated to be perilously determined by the…
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