by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

I have a strongly held belief that there’s no such thing as a bad year for movies. There are great years (1999 comes to mind), and there are just okay years, but no matter when you look, you’ll find a pile of good movies, usually enough to fill a top 10 list and beyond. And while those top 10 (or 15 or 20) scoop up the awards and the box office, dozens more don’t stay in the conversation. This year, I want to talk about one of the movies that I’ve come back to over and over again throughout 2024: Julio Torres’s directorial debut, Problemista.

Torres has slowly risen to prominence since joining the writing staff of Saturday Night Live in 2016. His hyperspecific, deeply queer sketches like “Wells for Boys,” “The Actress,” and “My Little Stepchildren” brought his unique voice to a massive audience and led to an HBO special, My Favorite Shapes and a series, Los Espookys, also on HBO, that ran for two seasons and won a Peabody award. This year, he premiered another series, Fantasmas, to critical acclaim. Torres has already made his mark as a singular voice in film and television, and Problemista is an ambitious, exciting first feature. Shot in 2021 and delayed after its South by Southwest premiere by the SAG-AFTRA strike, Problemista was released by A24 on March 1 of this year.

In addition to writing and directing, Torres stars as Alejandro, an imaginative young man raised by his artist mother, Dolores, (Catalina Saavedra, who was great in Sebastian Silva’s latest, Rotting in the Sun) in El Salvador. It’s Dolores’s love, support, and creative vision that allows Alejandro to move to New York to pursue his dream of being a toy designer for Hasbro. When Alejandro loses his job at a cryogenics facility, his legal status in the US is in jeopardy, and he has just thirty days to find a new employer to sponsor him. The possibility of sponsorship is dangled in front of him by Elizabeth Ascencio, (Tilda Swinton) the widow of the cryogenically frozen artist (RZA) Alejandro was caring for at the facility. She’s working to catalog, exhibit, and sell her late husband Bobby’s work, and hires Alejandro to assist her.

Problemista’s best moments come when Alejandro is forced to engage with the inherently unfair and dehumanizing US immigration system. As he waits in his lawyer’s office early in the film, he watches a woman as she’s told her visa was denied. Suddenly, the woman evaporates; the folder of paperwork she’s holding tumbles to the floor and the paralegal she was speaking with moves on to the next. As in Torres’s other work, these fantastical elements are a Trojan horse for Torres to attack the labyrinthian nightmare of immigration bureaucracy, overdraft fees, and more. “The maze is impossible to navigate,” intones the narrator (Isabella Rossellini) as Alejandro works his way through a literal maze of offices and paperwork. You need money to pay application and lawyer fees to get a visa, but you can’t earn money without a visa.   

Torres’s signature look and feel is prominent in Problemista. He operates in a dreamy, fantastical world, full of color and shimmer and mystery, but never a world that is free from red tape and minutiae.This strange, familiar-but-unfamiliar world is one he’s been establishing across his work. Larry Owens as the personification of Craigslist feels like he could appear in any of Torres’s projects. Alejandro’s suggested toy inventions, like a Barbie doll with her fingers crossed behind her back, is straight out of a Torres SNL sketch or My Favorite Shapes. In addition,Torres has built a collective of collaborators in the queer comedy scene that flesh out his universes. Several of those regulars appear here: River Ramirez, Martine, James Scully, and Spike Einbinder have all acted in multiple Torres projects. Though a new addition to the troupe, Swinton is the perfect muse for this sensibility, all wild eyes and campy rage.  

Problemista wasn’t entirely ignored when it came out. It was mostly well-received by critics, though it was never going to be the kind of film that received awards attention. It arrived on Max without much fanfare, though with Torres’s HBO special and series, it provides a nice little collection of his work available in one place. If you’re new to Torres’s work, spend some time getting to know his strange, singular voice through my personal favorite, Los Espookys, then give Problemista a try. 

As we move forward, all we know with certainty is that vulnerable people will continue to be exploited. Julio Torres makes beautiful, otherworldly universes, but the problems of those universes very much reflect our own. Problemista feels devastatingly urgent and relevant, and will likely remain so for years to come.