Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton create a comedy eclipse in 'Problemista' at SXSW

Tilda Swinton insists she’s not an actor. She’s an ethereal chameleon dwelling in a Scottish castle who came to the screen fully formed in her mutability, making long distance calls to other dimensions in the queer cinema of Derek Jarman and Sally Potter. She’s played a vampire rock star, an alienated Italian matriarch, the snowy personification of the Christian hell and a talking pug. A parody Twitter account devoted to her involved the frequent mention of ravens.

Julio Torres worked on “Saturday Night Live,” which is not actually a helpful reference point. At 36, the Salvadoran writer and comedian has starred in an HBO comedy special about his favorite shapes (titled “My Favorite Shapes”). His sense of humor on social media often manifests itself through crystals and McDonalds Happy Meal toys. In his most notable TV role, he performed opposite the moon.

These two impossible souls meet in “Problemista,” Torres’ directorial debut that made its world premiere during South by Southwest Film & TV Festival on Monday at the Paramount Theatre. He also wrote the film, which is already on A24's roster.

In “Problemista,” the ever-dreaming Ale (Torres) most desperately dreams of designing outré toys for Hasbro, but until he can employ his immense creativity to put phones in the fat little hands of Cabbage Patch dolls, he works as an archivist for a company that cryogenically freezes people. They don’t know how to wake them up yet, but they’re working on it.

A careless mistake ends in Ale getting fired, and unfortunately, that spirals into an immigration nightmare — he must find a new sponsor to stay in the U.S., but he can’t get a paying gig until his work visa is renewed by a sponsor. Desperate, he hitches his wagon to Elizabeth (Swinton), an erratic art world outcast trying to preserve the legacy of her husband (RZA), who painted portraits of eggs until illness sent him into one of those cryogenic pods, where he’s been … chillin’.

Except pinning Elizabeth down long enough to secure sponsorship is perhaps a more circuitous and maddening process than navigating the arcane U.S. immigration system. She’s passionate, argumentative, unrealistic and vindictive, and if she’s obsessed with anything more than tracking down her husband’s eggs to put in an exhibition, it’s FileMaker Pro. Will Ale solve enough of her problems to beat the sand trickling down his visa’s hourglass?

In interviews about “Problemista” at SXSW, Swinton said that her sole reason for signing onto the project was Torres. Since her keynote at the conference Monday, I’ve been struck by Swinton’s devotion to all things collective: to good company, and to surrounding herself with creative collaborators who can play around instead of debasing themselves by “acting.”

Torres, too, is part of a comedy community: His rising generation of funny folks like Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Larry Owens and Greta Titelman often appear in each other’s projects, like a gay, millennial Rat Pack. Owens and Titelman, in fact, appear in “Problemista”: the latter as a scorned protege of Swinton's character and the former as the anthropomorphized embodiment of Craigslist. Also worth celebrating in the "Problemista" ensemble: James Scully as an insufferable nepo baby getting a graduate degree on being cute in the arts and River L. Ramirez as a Bank of America customer service rep who sells maybe the greatest line reading of the film.

Their cinematic marriage is a strange, explosively touching expression of the collectivism that both artists seem to enjoy.

Elizabeth, in her grief, directs her fearsome power to preserving the ovoid oeuvre of her husband, and God save whoever stands in her way. Ale, far from home and by himself, finds unlikely community with a woman who has pushed away everyone. Together, they — on a good day — understand each other, and speak the same artistic language.

Luckily for “Problemista” and for SXSW viewers, Torres and Swinton speak the same artistic language, too. And it’s so, so funny.

Every word out of Elizabeth’s mouth terrorizes the laughter center of your brain, from her insistence FileMaker Pro is the Cadillac of database software to her declaration of war on walnuts in salads to her repeated insistence that soft-spoken people stop yelling at her. To be clear, Elizabeth does little that could be characterized as “likeable,” but Ale likes her all the same, and you can tell Torres finds power in the Elizabeths of the world. Swinton’s performance might be one of the greatest feats of empathy onscreen you’ve seen.

More:Tilda Swinton teases a musical, lauds Derek Jarman at dreamy, bagpipe-laden SXSW keynote

In fact, “Problemista” lives and dies by your ability to give your mind’s eye over to Torres, who sees the world like few do. His visual vocabulary alone should excite film lovers. Conflicts between Ale and Elizabeth become tint-washed battles with a dragon in some imaginationscape. In a coup for show-don’t-tell, the chaos of Elizabeth’s life is portrayed through quick cuts to melancholy little tableaus around her loft — a phone charger snaked around a high heel on the ground, for instance.

It’s a feast for the senses all around. Composer Robert Ouyang Rusli’s dark synths transform grubby New York apartments into fantasy realms, Isabella Rossellini’s narration (way to bury the lede) hypnotizes, and a late-film montage of fantastical shapes appearing in the spaces we’ve visited throughout the story stirs an ache for all of us, we strange little forms inhabiting the suffocatingly normal spaces of our lives.

As a first-time feature filmmaker, Torres knocked it out of the transdimensional park, but as a first-time filmmaker, there are a few kinks. Sweet cutaways to Ale’s mother back in El Salvador (Catalina Saavedra) are welcome, but they never quite tie a knot to the rest of the story. The ending, which Torres in a SXSW Q&A said didn’t come together until later in the process, bursts the bubble of surrealism that held the movie aloft for so long and tries to answer questions where a little mystery would have satisfied.

A big creative explosion like “Problemista” is bound to bleed past the edges of the feeble human mind, though. For all its beautiful collectivism, perhaps its most sophisticated trick is making room for the power of self.

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Elizabeth imparts her life’s ethos to Ale, who's despairing over the limbo of Hasbro’s silence. Get the name of a person there, she urges, and make yourself a problem.

Absolutely messy advice? Sure. But in an unjust world full of predatory systems, you might call that good trouble — or the art of the problemista.

Grade: A-

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: SXSW film review: 'Problemista' starring Tilda Swinton, Julio Torres