Wow, Julio Torres is a trip! Fantasmas is my first experience of his wild sensibility, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Is there a pithy way to encapsulate its vibe? Probably not, but I can manage a one-sentence description: Fantasmas is a surrealist, science fictional sketch comedy full of sly commentary about the madness of our present, projected by the whimsical brain of a singular auteur.
Torres stars as himself, a quirky young man whose main vocation in life is to be his unrestrained self. When we first meet him, he is pitching a “clear-colored” crayon to Crayola, for…reasons. Julio’s primary vocation is, well, to muse philosophically on the peculiarities of life, sometimes with the assistance of his “agent” Vanesja (Martine Gutierrez), who isn’t an actual agent, but a performance artist who has been pretending to be an agent for so long than she has accidentally become one. But Julio’s carefree pondering grows existential when his looming eviction forces him to confront an officious world that requires government-issued “Proof of Existence” to apply for a new apartment. Meanwhile, a dark spot on his neck might be growing. Is it cancerous? This sets him on a wild goose chase for an oyster-shaped earring he’s pretty sure was the same size as his neck-spot; the earring has gone missing, but if he can find it, he can prove to the hospital he needs a biopsy…well, and so on.
It’s difficult to tell if Fantasmas is actively working to feel indescribable, or not working at all at it—rather, just kind of getting there effortlessly. Yet, for all its stream-of-conscious zaniness, it does make a kind of sense. In its inimitable, cockeyed way, it’s an incisive critique of modern societal inanity. While outlandish zigzagging from skit to skit gives it a Pythonesque sketch-comedy energy, Torres is talking about serious stuff, from America’s callous healthcare system to the absurdity of immigration documentation to the stultifying forces of conformity. On the surface it all seems frothy and disposable, but there is subversive weight to it, and the ideas are often conceptually connected.
Given the experimental nature of the show’s scattered approach, it’s fair to say that the laughs and pacing on Fantasmas are uneven. Yet the scenes and episodes have a stimulating cumulative effect. Given the guest-star firepower—Aidy Bryant, Steve Buscemi, Paul Dano, Natasha Lyonne, Rosie Perez, and Emma Stone, among other familiar faces—the industry has taken notice of Torres. Now that I have too, I look forward to seeing what else he has up his sleeve.
