I’m not sure what I was expecting out of Julio Torres’s sweet and quirky almost fairytale about speaking up for yourself. Something easy to watch. I wasn’t expecting to find it so poignant.

Alejandro (Torres) has grown up in El Salvador with a mother who made all of his child dreams come true. If he wanted a tower with stars for windows, she would build it. She had a persistent dream that he would be dressed in blue and would face a monster so was reluctant to let him go but as an adult he follows his dream of being a toy designer for Hasbro and moves to the United States.

His ideas are quirky – a Barbie doll who has her fingers crossed behind her back, a smart phone for cabbage patch dolls or a toy car that has tyres that deflate. Hasbro isn’t interested though and so he ends up working for a company that cryogenically freezes artists, being archivist for one particular artist Bobby (RZA) who paints only eggs. 

Bobby‘s flame haired wife Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) has survived him and is the kind of person who will always ask for exactly what she wants, and not just ask she will harangue you until you crumple. When Alejandro loses his job over a minor oversight, Elizabeth takes him on as an assistant to help her stage a solo show of Bobby‘s work so that she can keep funding his cryogenics, promising to sponsor his work visa if he acquiesces.

The heart of the film is the relationship between Elizabeth and Alejandro. He is the kind of person that will quietly ask and never insist and of course this means that he is not living his dream and is in danger of being thrown out of the United States. Elizabeth is something of a monster, and we see this in some dreamlike scenes where she becomes more and more monstrous and Alejandro becomes more and more trapped.

Alejandro and how he is personified is adorable. From his shuffling gait, to his hair that sometimes sticks up, to his calm sweetness in the face of bad behaviour, you can’t help but feel for him. What I loved most about this, as well as the clever humour, is the way Elizabeth is treated as a character not a stereotype and how their friendship develops.

It will leave you feeling good about the world and feeling like, if you want it enough, and if you’re willing to send the food back, and ask for the manager, and see past petty rules, you might just get what you dream of.