Problemista (2024)

Direction: Julio Torres
Country: USA

Problemista is the directorial feature debut by Salvadoran-American Julio Torres, who embraces fantasy to tell the story of Alejandro, an aspiring toy maker from El Salvador who struggles to keep working and living in New York. Torres himself portrays the main character.

After losing his job as an archivist for FreezeCorp - a company specialized in freezing terminally ill humans to be awakened at some point in the future - Alejandro desperately finds a new sponsor for his work Visa and easy gigs on Craigslist to stay afloat. The solution is Elizabeth (a red-haired Tilda Swinton in top form), a neurotic, washed-up art critic whose painter husband (the rapper RZA) has been frozen.

The film flows stonily, with an offbeat vibe that often seduces, yet the wittiness is not a constant, working intermittently. The film is stronger on the dramatic side, with its best moments tapping into a sadness and disappointment with the world that most people will relate to. Swinton’s unbeatable delirium is a perfect foil for Torres’ apathetic confidence in a well-acted surrealist comedy whose main strength is the mood. 

Problemista is only partially satisfying and easy to overlook, but hope is its last word - even if it means achieving things forcibly - and some aspects addressed are so true that they stay with you. It surely could have been better, but this is still a positive debut for Torres, who hired Isabella Rossellini as the film’s narrator.

The Eternal Daughter (2022)

Direction: Joanna Hogg
Country: UK 

Deftly written and directed by Joanna Hogg, who stunned us with works like The Souvenir (2019) and Archipelago (2010), The Eternal Daughter is a slow-burning study of loss and dependence. It’s a double role for the unmatchable Tilda Swinton who plays mother and daughter with unfailing consistency as they stay at a remote haunted hotel - once their former family home - where creaking doors, long dark corridors, rattling windows, and occasional ghostly figures create a chilly atmosphere that fades with the time. It spins its wheels with subtle psychological disturbance, which is a reflection of unhealthy filial ties.

The place revives all sorts of memories in the mother, and creates some emotional turmoil in the daughter, a filmmaker who is trying to write her next project based on their relationship. Although the rooms seem to hold stories and secrets, the process is somewhat repetitive. Whereas the eeriness decreases considerably, the climax falls victim of some momentary disclosing flashbacks that work as inhibitors of surprise. 

The outside night shots are intensifiers of the intended mood, as well as the ambiguous side characters - a carefree receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) and a gentle caretaker (Joseph Mydell) - who prove to be irrelevant in the end. And the apprehensive music soars, highlighting both enigmas and emotions.

Definitely a minor Hogg’s, The Eternal Daughter is like a poignant melody packed with pathos and a sumptuous staging; a purge of guilt and memories that, without taking the form of a labyrinth of artsy manipulations, never hits too hard. I wish I would have been more spooked here.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Direction: George Miller
Country: USA 

From the creator of Mad Max, the writer-director George Miller, Three Thousand Years of Longing showcases a reserved Tilda Swinton as Alithea, a respected professor in a comfortable white robe, and Idris Elba as a wish-granting, size-shifting Djinn inadvertently released from the bottle that was holding him prisoner for so long. 

The film, an uninspired adaptation of the short story The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A.S. Byatt, is marred by an overflow of images with arguable special effects and also discussions that drag on with convoluted meaning. Overall, it lacks emotion, and only the cinematography by John Seale (he worked with Miller on Mad Max: Fury Road) is something one should take into consideration.

In Istanbul, in the sequence of Alithea’s difficulty in making three wishes for herself, the Djinn feels compelled to tell his restless 3000-year story marked by the presences of the biblical figure Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), the knowledge-seeker Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), and the irascible Sultan Suleiman (Lachy Hulme). With a tone that teeters between delicate and affected, this fantasy drama has no claws to be of more than passing interest. Basically, it fails to achieve what it tries to claim: the power of a deeply engaging narrative.

Memoria (2021)

Direction: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Country: Colombia / Thailand / other

In Memoria, the most recent film by Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Recalls His Past Lives, 2010; Cemetery of Splendor, 2015), Tilda Swinton plays Jessica Holland, a Scottish woman in search for the meaning of hearing a particular sound in Bogotá, Colombia. She left Medellin, where she lives, to visit her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke), who is in the hospital with an unidentified illness. One night she wakes up in the middle of the night due to a sudden, intense bang that repeats the following days. Insomniac, she decides to go after it.

At once sensory and spiritual, this contemplative mystery of a movie plays like a journey filled with uncanny signs, philosophical quests, and revealing encounters. No one can guess where it leads. The spoken language may have changed but Weerasthekul’s cinematic attributes remain strangely hypnotic. Although uncreepy, the film probes otherworldly interactions and references past lives with a perceptive lyrical sense. It’s about life and death; past and present; animism and trauma; about how humans connect with each other and the multiple mysteries of the universe.

More than mind-blowing, Memoria is an original piece of cinema that, keenly shot and oddly paced, rewards patient viewers with an openness to the intangible. If cinema is about being transported to another realm and dimension, Weerasethakul is unrivaled as a helmsman.

Suspiria (2018)

Direction: Luca Guadagnino
Country: Italy / USA

Italian Luca Guadagnino, auteur of powerful films such as I Am Love (2009) and the critically acclaimed Call Me By Your Name (2017), makes his first move in the horror genre with a botched remake of Dario Argento’s 70s cult film Suspiria. Working from a screenplay by David Kajganich, who has previously worked with the director in A Bigger Splash (2015), Guadagnino had a gifted cast at his disposal, featuring Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton as protagonists, and Mia Goth and Angela Winkler in strong supporting roles.

The fiction takes place in 1977 Berlin, to where Ohio-born Susie Bannion (Johnson) moves definitely in order to join the prestigious international dance academy headed by the sinister Madame Blanc (one of the three roles of the amazing Swinton). Two influential dancers, Patricia Hingle (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Olga Ivanova (Elena Fokina), left the school psychologically affected with recondite occurrences. The former is missing; the latter was victimized by an invisible entity with virulent dance impulses. In the sequence of their absences, Suzie becomes the new protégé of the inscrutable, vampirelike Blanc. She can feel a dark force pushing her while working in the dance room and regularly affecting her dreams.

Practically speaking, the school is under the orders of a witch society, a rare phenomenon that piques the curiosity of Dr. Klemperer (Swinton), an experienced psychotherapist who started to pay better attention to what his patient Patricia kept saying. He decides to visit the premises after meeting with the incredulous Sara (Mia Goth), one of the dancers and Patricia’s best friend. What he finds is as much bizarre as it is inextricable: esoteric rituals filled with magic, possession, and illusion.

The geometric architectonic configurations and muted colors that compose the 35mm-shot frames are relevant and propitious to the film’s ambitions; however, Guadagnino’s practices are overlong, stiff, and risibly gory in the final minutes. I got numb-brained while trying to understand why a director of this caliber would want to spoil the enchanting gothic tones previously created with a nasty sequence of human heads blowing up in blood.

Suspiria is mediocre at its best, presenting very little substance and lacking interesting character development. The songs by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke provide short moments of pleasure in a film to be quickly erased from memory.

Okja (2017)

Directed by Bong Joon-ho
Country: USA / South Korea

Idolized Korean director Bong Joon-ho (“Memories of Murder”, “Mother”, “Snowpiercer”) teams up with co-writer Jon Ronson (“Frank”) and gives life to “Okja”, a big American-Korean production featuring an excellent cast composed of Hollywood stars such as Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, and Jake Gyllenhaal, as well as South Korean child actress Ahn Seo-hyun.

This polychromatic fantasy with dramatic lure begins with the wealthy, inhumane, and eccentric Lucy Mirando (Swinton) giving a conference in which she explains her eco-friendly plans to develop a super pig in 26 different countries. The new species is announced for 10 years from then and will be genetically created by a group of top scientists headed by Dr. Johnny Wilcox (Gyllenhaal), also a famous TV presenter known as ‘the very healthy guy’. 

The Korean super pig (likely a cross between a pig and a hypo) was baptized Okja and lives happily in the secluded mountains with the old farmer (Byun Hee-Bong) who raised it and his young granddaughter Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun), with whom it developed an everlasting friendship.

The resolute Mija heads alone to Seoul after Okja has been selected as the best pig and taken to the sophisticated Mirando Corp. Building for lab tests before a pompous public presentation on New York's Broadway.

The rescue of her best friend couldn’t have been possible without the help of five efficient activists from the Animal Liberation Front, whose leader, Jay (Dano), is totally aware of the greediness and psychopathic history of the Mirandos.

Their plan consists in unmasking the scam engendered by Lucy, who even pays to reunite Mija and Okja in front of the TV cameras. Even succeeding on this front, they still have to deal with her evil twin sister, Nancy, and drive the animal home, safely.
 
The film guarantees a great deal of entertainment through superb action scenes and a handful of thrilling moments. Even fictitious, we can’t help caring about the animals and the grueling treatment they are subjected to at the slaughterhouse. However, the humor lacks spirit and is confined to a couple situations when Okja defecates like rain drops and farts with a reverberant sound.

Released on Netflix and executive produced by Brad Pitt, this dramatic and satirical action-packed adventure aims at animal exploitation, rapaciousness, media attention, and consumerism with a critical eye. Nevertheless, Mr. Joon-ho, with all his talent, was unable to reach the same levels of satisfaction delivered in his much more gripping previous films.

As expected, Ms. Swinton is sensational as the villainess, while the cinematography by Darius Khondji, who also did a great job this year in James Gray’s “The Lost City of Z”, is a major asset, making use of the light in the best possible ways, whether on establishing shots, medium shots, or very detailed close-ups.