No one familiar with his work will be surprised by this insight, yet it still bears emphasizing: Julio Torres loved playing with his toys as a child.

As Torres grew up in San Salvador, El Salvador, his mother, an architect and designer, and his father, a civil engineer, cultivated his imaginative tendencies with care. “[I was] always just off in my own little world,” the multi-talented comedian tells me. “I was in a sort of daydream incubator growing up. I feel like that’s how I learned to love storytelling, is by casting the toys in their little dramas. My mom would help me create doll houses and design them. Building those worlds was so fun.”

He also concocted dilemmas for the little cars that his dad would always bring him from the gas station, reminiscing, “I would love to put them in looong rows and when people would ask, like, ‘What are you doing?’, I would just say, ‘I’m playing traffic. They’re just stuck in traffic and they don’t know why.’ I was always drawn to these existential quandaries.”

I tell Torres that I can’t drive—“Me neither!” he chimes in—and that I’ve never completely understood the concept of traffic. Why don’t the cars at the front just go? His eyes light up as he slowly repeats the idea. “I love that. Why don’t the cars at the front just… go?”

His playful feature debut Problemista encourages constant questioning. In addition to writing, directing and producing, Torres stars as Ale, short for Alejandro, an aspiring Salvadoran toy designer in New York City hoping to secure a spot in the Hasbro Talent Incubator Program with his idiosyncratic concepts. (“Toys these days are wonderful, but they are a little bit too preoccupied with fun,” he notes in his application video.) Ale makes ends meet by working at a cryogenics facility looking after the archives of the frozen Bobby (RZA, sporting yellow-chick fuzz), a painter who exclusively depicts eggs.

After a small mishap, Ale must swiftly secure a new work visa sponsor or face deportation. His desperation leads him into the clutches of the hot-headed, demanding Elizabeth (an incomparable Tilda Swinton), Bobby’s art critic wife who promises the keys to his salvation if he helps her curate the egg paintings into a show.

Plenty has changed over the nine months since our conversation—for one, Torres’s hair is no longer the faded red of our call—but his singular portrait of a creative striving on the margins feels prescient as ever. With Problemista, the former Saturday Night Live writer brings his signature surreal sensibilities to the Kafkaesque US immigration system. A flipped hourglass and an absurd, out-of-this-world staircase of locked rooms represents the endlessly contradictory bureaucracy.

The churning gears of the gig economy grind on Alejandro, too, represented by Larry Owens’ glitching embodiment of Craigslist. But though Alejandro pursues his hyper-specific dream with resiliency, the film takes care to avoid bootstraps mythology. He trudges toward his toys not due to any misplaced confidence in the American dream but because, as Isabella Rossellini’s narrator sagely informs the audience, Ale’s mother gave him everything, so he wanted everything. He becomes a “problemista”, learning how to thrive in the problems that he can’t help but create for himself.

“I don’t want to make a movie that encourages people to try hard, because people already know that they’re supposed to try hard,” explains Torres, who finds it more compelling to look around and question the “why” underlying systems—“to not see capitalism as a sport that you can win if you try hard enough but to be like, ‘Wait, why is this a relay race? Who put those hurdles there? And why do I have to jump them?’” (Even Alejandro’s toys carry questions, like the slinky that refuses to go down the stairs—why should it go down alone just for your amusement?)

He laughs, continuing, “This is not really a movie about a young man training really hard to jump the hurdles. It’s about a young man who had to go outside the track, find another way in, go up the stairs, down the stairs, dig a hole and then get to the end of it. Because the jumping of the hurdles, it’s a game designed for people who are able to do that.

“This myth about getting good grades, getting the scholarship, going to the right school, picking someone’s brain [over] coffee, networking, getting the right job, getting the right salary, moving up that ladder, is just accessible to some people. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone wants to do that! I don’t want to celebrate that system. Something Alejandro keeps asking is, ‘Why? Why is this the way it is?’ It’s like parking in front of a fire hydrant, for which you would get a ticket, but why? If nothing happened, then why are we so interested in punishment?”

Through its fantastical visuals, Problemista launches off from the emotional contours of Torres’s early days in New York. After graduating from the New School, the comedian navigated the precarious process of obtaining a work visa and took odd jobs to stay afloat, working coat check in an art gallery and as an archivist for an artist’s estate.

“Well, the beauty and the tragedy about software like that is that it promises to be the end of chaos. It promises, like Elizabeth says, ‘Order will reign supreme at last,’” he responds, still laughing. “And for someone as turbulent and as chaotic as Elizabeth to have the promise of order dangled in front of her and being so out of reach is the most frustrating thing in the world, and that software just became a vessel for that.”

Childlike curiosity and whimsy shimmer throughout Torres’s work. He’s Fruit Tree—he muses on the inner lives of inanimate objects brought to him via a conveyor belt, joking that having a captive audience to watch as he plays with his toys is a childhood dream come true. He’s even written a children’s book.

Problemista feels akin to a fairy tale: there’s the knight, the dragon, the narrator, a wonderful dream. “I knew that the movie was going to be… almost like a quest. He just felt like a little mouse, and I have definitely felt like a little mouse,” Torres says.

Elizabeth doesn’t usually channel her bottomless tenacity for good, instead enacting her rage upon unsuspecting service workers and former assistants. And as a white woman with multiple homes, she operates from a place of privilege that Alejandro doesn’t. “Even though Elizabeth feels like an outsider, I think that it’s impossible to divorce that from the privilege that she yields,” Torres says.

“Something that comes with that is stating that you belong somewhere. Alejandro has to shed some of that imposter syndrome, and he picks that from someone who doesn’t have that, either because she never needed to or because she got rid of it. Regardless, he observes that and learns how to use that. But he has what she doesn’t have, which is having been through all these things, and having some empathy.”

He adds, “But also, I think that we approach Elizabeth with great empathy. Because she, in her bones, does feel like an outsider, and she operates from a place of hurt in that. That was more interesting to me than making a movie about just a mean lady.”

That brings into play the movie’s other odd-couple relationship: Elizabeth and Bobby, two art world outcasts. As exemplified by their artist-critic roles, their pairing touches on searching for fulfillment in art that’s not necessarily understood by the masses. “I think that Elizabeth, because she herself feels like an outsider, whether or not that’s true, she saw herself in Bobby, and Bobby saw himself in her,” Torres remarks.

“I knew that I wanted the question to be: was Bobby unsuccessful because of his paintings, or was Bobby set to fail from the get-go? If Bobby had been white, would these paintings be at the MoMA?” he ponders. “It’s impossible to separate artists from context. We never see things in a vacuum. Even when they’re hanging in a museum, even when they’re hanging at a gallery, someone had to decide to put them there. And what went into that?”

The tender treatment of Bobby’s egg paintings encapsulates the Problemista philosophy. “I think the note with a lot of the things in the movie is: don’t make fun of the eggs. Bobby loooves the eggs. He’s in love with them,” Torres emphasizes. “He wants the viewer to also love them, so they should be gorgeously nesting on satin. They should be presented as the most beautiful thing in the world. Because what he loves the most, what this movie loves the most, is possibility, is what could come. It’s about learning how to love potential and learning how to love that liminal space between an idea and it coming into fruition.”

“That’s what the eggs are about,” Torres concludes. “The humor will come, but they should be portrayed with sincerity.”