‘Fantasmas’ review: Surreal Julio Torres comedy is like nothing else on TV

There is nothing at all fairly like seeing the globe by way of Julio Torres’ eyes.

The writer and director has a knack for crafting strange stories primarily based on the world’s most mundane particulars. In his beloved SNL sketch “Papyrus,” the font of the Avatar logo becomes the bane of Ryan Gosling’s existence. In his comedy specific My Favored Shapes, Torres breathes life into anything from a red plastic square to a Hunchback of Notre Dame Delighted Meal toy. Even his longer-kind projects like Los Espookys or Problemista render the minutia of our every day lives as absurd as probable, from time to time turning trash into treasure.

With his most current project, the HBO series Fantasmas, Torres brings his singular musings on the factors we take for granted to new heights. What begins as an odyssey to obtain a lost earring swiftly spirals into a thing stranger: a collection of vignettes boasting as a great deal pathos as offbeat humor. Nowhere else will you see a melancholic riff on the order of the alphabet, or a psychosexual showdown amongst client service representatives. Every single of these compact stories is a delight in itself, but when you bind them collectively, you get the surreal shock to the program that is Fantasmas.

What is Fantasmas about?

In Fantasmas, Torres plays a fictionalized version of himself. Like his genuine-life counterpart, the show’s Julio sees the globe differently from other individuals. He can sense the inner lives of objects and ideas, a point of view he’s translated to consulting jobs for locations like Crayola (he suggests they make clear crayons) and NASA (he’s assisting rebrand a constellation).

Julio’s fanciful life butts up against expectations of conformity, to the point that he refuses to get the so-referred to as “Proof of Existence” required to recognize him. Proof of Existence is vital for Julio’s upcoming apartment hunt — his present constructing is becoming turned into a Basic Mills Café and Residencies, just one particular of several dystopian particulars that colour Fantasmas‘ alternate version of New York. Nevertheless, as an alternative of taking the methods to get this new kind of ID, Julio turns his interest to discovering a golden oyster earring he lost at a club. His rambling quest serves as a framing story for Fantasmas, which flits in and out of vignettes at a moment’s notice, calling to thoughts a madcap assortment show.

These vignettes make up a sizable chunk of Fantasmas, and to say extra about their actual storylines would be to spoil a great deal of the show’s exciting. But there is a continuous joy at the discovery of every single new segment, which can take the kind of something from an advertisement to a dream sequence.

Most of the time, we finish up following a character Julio meets ever so briefly (played by a stacked bench of guest stars like Steve Buscemi and Julia Fox) into their each day lives. These modifications in viewpoint shift us from the surface-level impressions of these initial encounters to wealthy character research. Normally, all these oddball characters want is meaningful connection in an increasingly impersonal globe. Fantasmas shows us the lengths men and women are prepared to go to to obtain that connection, that sense of becoming observed, all with Torres’s characteristically dreamy flourishes.

Fantasmas presents a brilliantly surreal New York.

In addition to its freewheeling structure, one particular of Fantasmas‘ greatest pleasures is its globe-constructing. Torres invites us into an absurdist fantasy New York, exactly where clubbing hamsters and Smurf-like creatures rub shoulders with overall performance artists and aspiring actors. Production designer Tommaso Ortino adds to the fantasy with colorful sets straight out of a surreal theater show. Some rooms are normally missing ceilings or walls, providing way to a black void. Other people are twisting, turning mazes, calling to thoughts the set of My Favored Shapes or the labyrinthine representation of the U.S. immigration method in Problemista.

The theatrical really feel of the sets extends all through Fantasmas, from elaborate puppetry to cartoonish sound effects to a repeating motif of a miniature proscenium. But as an alternative of evoking artifice, these clearly handmade components invite us into the crafting method, highlighting Fantasmas‘ characters’ scrappy attempts to develop a thing new. Overall performance artist Vanesja (Martine) — the “j” is silent — got also invested in a piece exactly where she pretended to be Julio’s agent, to the point that she is now definitely an agent. Driver Chester (Tomás Matos) has made a rideshare app just for their car or truck — “it is providing grassroots,” they inform Julio. Even Julio’s robot assistant Bibo (voiced by Joe Rumrill) dreams of becoming an actor.

Nonetheless, reality rears its ugly head in the face of these dreams, as Torres’ fantasy New York is not immune to the horrors of bureaucracy and late-stage capitalism. A stop by to a doctor’s workplace is juxtaposed with a ticking countdown, equivalent to Problemista‘s hourglass imagery tied to expiring function visas. Corporations take more than apartment complexes. At one particular point, in an work to get out of obtaining Proof of Existence, Julio tries to sell a show to Zappos’ new streaming service. That is just one particular of several moments in which Fantasmas skewers the entertainment business, such as a pointed superhero send-up that nonetheless manages to obtain new ground in a genre that is currently been parodied to death.

But even with all these situations of outdoors forces mandating conformity, Fantasmas‘ kooky characters handle to forge their personal paths. The similar is accurate of Fantasmas itself, which breaks its personal mold time and once again to build a thing that is wholly distinctive, relevant, and unabashedly weird. There is nothing at all on Television fairly like it, its shimmering strangeness creating it just as valuable as Julio’s coveted golden oyster earring.

Fantasmas premieres June 7 at 11:00 p.m. ET on HBO and Max, with a new episode weekly.