I must confess that “Problemista”, which is currently available on Netflix in South Korea, was an acquired taste for me. At first, I was baffled a lot by its colorfully quirky comic style coupled with a heap of surrealistic absurdity, but then the movie becomes sort of sincere and endearing while never dulling its distinctive style and humor, and I came to admire its odd comic concoction more as having a bit of good laugh.

Julio Torres, who also directed and wrote the film in addition to serving as one of its producers, plays Alejandro, a meek El Salvadoran lad who recently moved to New York City for realizing his little but precious dream. Even when he was very young, Alejandro’s artistic creativity was constantly nurtured by his artist mother, and he sincerely hopes that he will succeed as a toy maker in US someday.

However, not so surprisingly, Alejandro has struggled with a lot of harsh reality since he arrived in New York City. He applied for the employment at a certain prominent toy company with some original ideas for new toys, but there has not been any response yet. For maintaining a labor visa to allow him to stay in US at least for a while, he has to work in some cryogenic company instead, and all he has to do is simply maintaining a little room where the body of some unknown artist is being stored along with some personal stuffs.

On one day, his life gets turned upside down unexpectedly. Alejandro gets fired just because of a minor mistake, so he naturally becomes quite panicked about losing his labor visa sooner or later, but then there comes an unlikely opportunity via Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), who is incidentally the wife of that unknown artist. She happens to need an assistant to help her gathering and then exhibiting the works of her husband, and Alejandro willingly offers himself to Elizabeth even though he does not know anything about how to work under her.

Needless to say, Elizabeth turns out to be quite demanding and confusing to say the least. Besides her constantly capricious temper, she frequently demands Alejandro to do one thing after another, and Alejandro manages to do the jobs despite his considerable lack of skills, but it becomes more apparent to him that his new boss is utterly impossible. She wants to gather all those works by her husband just because she needs to sell them all for getting enough money for maintaining his current status, but, alas, his works still do not draw much attention as before, even though she firmly believes that they are valuable artworks. Naturally, she becomes all the more desperate and neurotic than before.

Nevertheless, Alejandro keeps trying to tolerate and support his new boss, even while his current situation becomes a lot more desperate than before. Till the deadline recently set upon him, he must have enough money for extending his labor visa in addition to persuading Elizabeth to become his American sponsor, and the movie has some naughty fun with how much he is tempted to bend himself lower for getting the money as soon as possible. At one point later in the story, he lets himself get hired as a “cleaning boy” via Craigslist, and that leads to one of the most absurd moments in the film.

Meanwhile, Alejandro’s creative mind cannot help but imagine one thing after another, and that is where the movie becomes quite surrealistic to our bafflement and amusement. We see how he conceives those funny ideas for new toys, and then we get a brief but striking fantasy moment showing the absurd aspects of a bureaucratic system which always puts one obstacle after another in front of him. As trying to deal with Elizabeth’s crazy demands every day, he often imagines himself as a knight to handle a dragon figure representing Elizabeth, and that certainly generates some extra amusement for us.

All these and many other comic moments in the film could be merely whimsical on the surface, but the movie gradually reveals surprisingly sincere sides behind its flamboyant comic style. Alejandro’s ideas for new toys in the film were actually from Torres himself and his mother, and we can clearly sense some personal aspects from them. In case of Elizabeth, she turns out to be a bit more than a wacky caricature as showing some heart to her struggling employee, and we come to accept her incorrigibly tempestuous nature as much as Alejandro does around the end of the story.

Torres’ earnest lead performance functions as a straight counterpoint to many surreal elements in the story including the delightfully hammy performance from Tilda Swinton, who gladly chews every moment of hers in the film as demanded. While Isabella Rossellini also has a lot of fun in her deadpan narration, Catalina Saavedra provides some warmth to the film as Alejandro’s caring mother, and several notable performers including RZA, Greta Lee, Kelly McCormack, and Larry Owens ably fill their respective spots around the story.

Overall, “Problemista” is decidedly offbeat from the beginning to the end, but it surely demonstrates the considerable talent of Torres, who has been known as one of the main writers for “Saturday Night Live”. To be frank with you, I am not so familiar with many of his works, but I can tell you instead that he makes a promising feature film debut here, and it will be interesting to see what may come next from him in the future.