A24’s Problemista Tells a Weird, Magical Immigration Story — & I Loved It

A24’s Problemista is a weird, magical movie that tackles the confusion and strangeness of early adulthood from the perspective of a soft-spoken but creative immigrant from Central America. 

Written and directed by Julio Torres (Los Espookys, My Favorite Shapes), it tells the story of Alejandro (Torres) and his hyper-specific ambition: he wants to be a toy designer for Hasbro. An immigrant from El Salvador struggling to survive in New York City, Alejandro has the kind of fertile imagination that matches this goal, but he lacks the connections and flashiness to convince Hasbro that they should hire him and realize his dream. Unlike some U.S. citizens, Alejandro doesn’t have all the time in the world to achieve his dream – his U.S. work visa depends on his employment, so he is forced to navigate the obstacles of adult life as he worries about his immigration status. 

The film is partly autobiographical, drawing from Torres’ own experiences of adult confusion and lack of connections when the actor-scriptwriter-director-comedian was trying to get his creative projects picked up in Hollywood. Using the main character’s ingenuity as a jumping off point, Torres’ Problemista titters between the harsh realities of American society’s disdain for immigrants and Alejandro’s wacky and fantastical reinterpretations of these realities. 

The film starts with Alejandro’s hopeful video application to Hasbro’s toy designer incubator program. While he waits for an answer, Alejandro works for a cryo-freezer company, which rich people pay to have their living bodies frozen in the hopes of being reanimated in the future. Like many immigrants, Alejandro isn’t working in the field he prefers to be in, and as he imagines Cabbage Patch Kid dolls with smartphones, he makes an unforgivable mistake at the job. As the archivist in charge of the frozen body of an artist, Bobby (RZA), who was obsessed with painting eggs, Alejandro’s only job is to make sure the cryo-freezer’s backup power source is plugged in — unfortunately, one day he realizes it’s not. Though he plugs it back on, his employers are merciless: he is fired the next day. Without this job — as boring and irrelevant as it was to him — Alejandro only has a month to find another employer to sponsor his work visa.  

In its weirdness and unpredictability, Problemista is a fresh perspective on the struggles of immigration in the U.S. While navigating a situation that is stressful, unjust, and simply infuriating, the hero of our story uses his imagination to catapult himself out of the despair that immigration is prone to cause its navigators, making life into an adventure rather than a misery-filled obstacle course. As Alejandro is fired from his cryo-freeze archivist job — “But I only made one mistake,” he pleads with his white woman boss, who doesn’t hesitate to terminate him despite knowing he might get deported — he runs into the wife of the frozen corpse he was caring for, Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton). Elizabeth is a quirky white woman artist who Alejandro sees as his last chance to get a sponsor for his work visa, as she offers him freelance work to come up with an exhibition for the paintings by her frozen husband. Swinton is almost unrecognizable in this role, a strange woman who is both infuriatingly callous and surprisingly helpful to our hero.

As Alejandro’s time to get an employment sponsorship runs out, he gets deeply involved in Elizabeth’s adventures and becomes entangled in her grief. As he helps her collect all her late husband’s paintings for a hopeful exhibition, Alejandro’s labor feels both essential and disposable to Elizabeth, a paradox that a lot of immigrants have probably experienced. Elizabeth is the embodiment of the system Alejandro is trying to navigate, a world where Alejandro is never enough, no matter how hard he tries or how hard he works. This is where the autobiographical part of the film feels true — Torres understands the feelings of fighting to stay in the U.S. while also navigating the myriad of normal life obstacles that come with adulthood. It’s really hard to be an immigrant in this country, but the magic realism embedded in Alejandro’s story makes it less terrifying, more interesting than petrifying, and life-changing. 

The strength of Problemista lies in how the film reframes the boring and oppressive structures of racial capitalism as monsters, labyrinths, and games, demystifying what keeps us subjugated and taking the power away from the bureaucratic processes that terrorize immigrants on a daily basis. Torres avoided telling a sad immigration story, instead leaning into the comical and absurd aspects of trying to remain in a society that only values you through how useful your labor is and whether you follow the confusing legal paths of immigration. 

It was exciting to see Torres take such strong ownership of his story and of the immigrant narrative. The world he created in Problemista is a singular point-of-view that still manages to be relatable and subversive at the same time. It’s remarkable what immigrants are able to achieve in the film industry if they are given full creative freedom to stray away from the stereotypical stories and characters that put so much stigma and responsibility on their shoulders. Immigrant stories don’t have to only be about pain and oppression; they don’t have to only be about distance and deportation. As Torres has shown, immigrant stories can be about slaying monsters and standing up to rich white ladies and becoming famous toy designers.

While there wasn’t a lot of regional diversity, I appreciated that the main character is from El Salvador. Central America is seldom represented in film, so it felt important to highlight. I also loved Alejandro’s relationship with his mother who is back in El Salvador. It felt very realistic and relatable to see him FaceTime with her.

The language shifts from English to Spanish, and vice-versa, felt natural. Alejandro’s conversations with his mother were sweet, and reminded me of my own conversations with my mother when I lived far away from home.

There wasn’t a diversity of races and ethnicities in the film. However, the main character, Alejandro, is from El Salvador, which I feel is rare in films in the USA. 

This film managed to mix magic realism with subversion for the U.S. immigration system, which delivers an incredible challenge to immigrant stereotypes. Problemista stays away from telling an immigrant sob story. Instead characterizing the U.S. immigration system as a game, thus subverting and exposing U.S. power into something that is silly and nonsensical. This is a brilliant and necessary re-reading of a cruel and complicated system America invented and could abolish. 

I truly loved this film. I am excited to see what Julio Torres does next.