Problemista
“Alejandro’s financial stress—and existential dread—in Problemista as he waits to get a visa sponsorship could just as easily have been my own.”
Title: Problemista (2023)
Director: Julio Torres 👨🏽🇸🇻🇺🇸🌈
Writer: Julio Torres 👨🏽🇸🇻🇺🇸🌈
Reviewed by Weiting 👩🏻🇨🇳🇺🇸
Technical: 4/5
Writer-director Julio Torres’ debut feature Problemista is both a breath of fresh air and a force to be reckoned with. The sci-fi dramedy, which premiered last month at SXSW, follows Salvadoran protagonist Alejandro (Torres), an aspiring toy designer in New York City on the verge of losing his work visa.
The film starts with the unexplained rejection of Alejandro by Hasbro, the corporate giant he later learns has stolen his toy ideas. To make matters worse, he’s also fired from his day job at a biotech company that cryogenically freezes its clients to grant them immortality, due to his own negligence.
His last lifeline involves befriending Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a washed-up art critic whose artist husband Bobby (RZA) is currently frozen at the company. In exchange for her sponsorship of his visa, Alejandro helps Elizabeth retrieve Bobby’s 13 paintings of eggs to put together an art show.
The film’s use of satire recalls Torres’ work at SNL, such as the viral sketch “Papyrus” which highlights the subtle quirks of everyday life with melodrama and hyperbole. As expected, his humor lands squarely, but what shines even brighter are his otherworldly visuals, vivid and immersive thanks to help from a stellar art department. As Alejandro retreats into his creative inner world to escape anxieties and conflicts, Torres transports the viewers into heavens and hells of magical realism—from a sparkling, fairytale playground to a swampy cave where a dragonslayer duels a monster. Art director Jasmine Cho (M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass), production designer Katie Byron (Janicza Bravo’s Zola), and costume designer Catherine George (Bong Joon Ho’s Okja) boldly execute Torres’ zany vision. The result is an ethereal, cinematic feast that feels high on life.
Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
The electrifying chemistry between Alejandro and Elizabeth anchors Problemista and strikes an organic gender balance through two leads who grow and heal together. It’s empowering to see Elizabeth fight against gender-based and age-based discriminations while also standing up for the more confrontation-averse Alejandro. In a telling scene, a waiter forgets Alejandro’s request for vegan options and is met with Elizabeth’s explosive anger. She berates the waiter and heatedly encourages Alejandro to stick up for himself in the future.
On the one hand, her behavior could come across as bullying. But as our leads stumble further along their journey, we realize that Elizabeth doesn’t hold the requisite social power to be more than just a toothless bully—not against the waiter, nor later, over the art gallerist who makes light of her undying love for Bobby. They don’t respect her as a woman in her 60s whose career is largely in the rearview mirror, and they certainly don’t respect Alejandro, who’s a no-name foreigner to them.
Ultimately, Elizabeth shares the spotlight in Problemista, but she’s a fully realized character. Underneath her tough exterior sits layers of wisdom and life experience, as her seemingly overbearing advice for Alejandro emboldens him to demand a position and visa sponsorship from Hasbro. It’s her approach that anchors the film’s moral compass: Demand what you deserve, even when it can come off as “loud” or “rude” to those who seek to devalue you.
Race: 5/5
Born and raised in El Salvador, Torres attended The New School in New York City and went on to pursue creative writing. He based Problemista on his real-life experiences, both Torres and Alejandro scrambling to snatch a visa sponsor before time runs out.
This plot resonated with me as someone who’s had a very similar experience. Born and raised in China, I went to film school in Los Angeles to become a writer. Foreign students with career prospects in the arts have one year after graduation to secure a work visa that classifies us as “aliens of extraordinary ability.”
It’s a time-consuming, energy draining, money-sucking ordeal that the film’s creators and actors of color brilliantly translate to the screen. Mastering theatrics and visual metaphors, they paint a vivid picture of America’s immigration gatekeeping that psychologically, and financially, debilitates visa applicants.
In the film’s most intricate set piece, viewers are drawn into Alejandro’s nightmare where he crawls around from one flight of stairs to another with no end in sight. As his voice-over explains how the visa’s filing process resembles a pyramid scheme, the stairs contort into a cage that triggers a claustrophobic sense of confusion and exhaustion.
Alejandro’s financial stress—and existential dread—as he waits to get The Visa™ could just as easily have been my own, both of us reacting by spending all our money and boasting our achievements to prove we’re worthy of being “legal.” But the futility of our actions can be found right in the visa paperwork—as “aliens of extraordinary ability,” we’re asked to be tops of our field yet never belonging. Problemista exposes this daunting, and often nonsensical, rigor required of America’s immigration system. Simultaneously, it debunks the myth of the “job-stealing immigrant” with artistic flair.
In addition to Torres, Larry Owens, the versatile Black actor/comedian/writer/singer, plays an anthropomorphic version of the classified ads website, Craigslist. He becomes a running motif throughout the film, arriving whenever Alejandro’s broke to drag him into a twilight zone and enchant him with sketchy side hustles that pay pennies and dimes. Owens and Torres nail the sadomasochistic duo, using metaphor to paint Alejandro’s financial codependency with Craigslist in a memorable way.
Bonus for Age: +0.75
Elizabeth’s charm resides in her flaws and whims, and the idiosyncratic 62-year-old Swinton commands such tricky territory with ease. Furthermore, the 70-year-old screen legend Isabella Rossellini narrates the film, her deep voice evoking a comforting sense of déjà vu that underlines Problemista’s humanity.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.25
Though openly gay, Torres has been vocal about not wanting to be defined by his sexual orientation. It follows, then, that despite Problemista’s semi-autobiographical nature, the film never mentions Alejandro’s queerness or otherwise.
Mediaversity Grade: A- 4.67/5
Problemista rises above a swarm of formulaic productions that sell empty slogans about “diversity” and “representation.” Instead, it lets the art speak for itself, open to interpretation and making viewers like myself feel seen beyond our outward identities.
Like Problemista? Try these other titles that expose the broken American immigration system.
Yellow Rose (2019)
The Sun Is Also a Star (2019)
I Carry You With Me (2020)