Martine Gutierrez

In Fantasmas (2024), Martine Gutierrez plays Vanesja, a performance artist turned talent agent. It is a useful part for an actor who can make a conspicuously invented character fit into an ensemble. Alongside Julio Torres and Tomas Matos, who plays Chester, she stays distinctive without competing to be the strangest person present. We warmed to Vanesja because Gutierrez does not make every exchange a demand to admire her eccentricity. That restraint gives the others space, and makes us want to spend longer with her.

Her screen work follows a visual-art practice already concerned with how people construct an image of themselves. Her artist book Indigenous Woman (2018) uses the format of a fashion magazine for self-portraits and mock editorials. The move into acting came through collaborations with Torres, including Los Espookys (2022) and Problemista (2024). Fantasmas gives her the largest screen part of the three. Costumes, personas and the business of presenting a person were already her subjects; acting gives her someone else's characters to work with.

Torres is a particularly apt collaborator because his comedy has a use for that experience. Fantasmas is sharp about the expectation that an artist should arrive with an identity ready to be packaged and sold. Casting Gutierrez as an artist who has become an agent puts her close to that joke without needing an explanation of her other work. Her performance belongs to the comedy rather than sitting outside it as a knowing commentary. We can enjoy Vanesja without first reading an exhibition catalogue.

The reservation is with the freedom Torres gives the sketches: some detours are allowed more room than they earn. Gutierrez helps keep the company worth following, but one substantial television part cannot tell us everything about her acting. We would be interested to see a director ask her for something less closely tied to the questions she already explores in her art. For now, start with Fantasmas, where she has proper room to work.