Rome Film Festival 2025: Mad Bills to Pay (dir. Joel Alfonso Vargas) | Review
With Mad Bills to Pay, Joel Alfonso Vargas announces himself as a bold new voice in American cinema — delivering a tender, political, and irresistibly alive debut that turns the Bronx into a poem of struggle, love, and modern humanity.
Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) is the absolute must see debut feature of Dominican-American filmmaker Joel Alfonso Vargas. Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Mad Bills is a profoundly moving, political firework of movie; a portrait of a humid, restless summer in the modern day Bronx.
The story follows Rico (played by Juan Collado), a 19 year-old hustling through long, sticky summer days selling bootleg cocktails along the coast. When he discovers that Destiny (Destiny Checho), a girl from his school who he’s met on the beach, is pregnant with his child, he invites her to live in his family’s already-crowded apartment, alongside his hard working mother, Andrea (Yohanna Florentino) and younger sister, Sally (Nathaly Navarro).
The film is a prescient watch in light of the contemporary U.S. landscape, but Mad Bills never strains or overstates the politics. Vargas manages to weave the precarious nature of the gig economy, the omnipresence of social media, the code-switching of intergenerational migrant families and the permeation of conspiracy and misinformation into mainstream conversation without ever feeling forced or contrived. The raw, poetic, and political makes Mad Bills, at its best, reminiscent of the Chloé Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me or Andrea Arnold’s Bird.
Vargas and his cinematographer capture the Bronx in a cinematographically dreamy colour-scape. The actors have been perfectly cast, with Juan Collado’s performance as Rico being nothing less than extraordinary. Destiny Checho, too, delivers a remarkable turn as the film’s Destiny. The dynamics between sister, mother and brother are played out magnificently; the realism of the tension and tenderness of their relationships never falters, not even for a second.
Mad Bills to Pay is one of those rare debuts that manages to hit every note. It’s a film about family, migration, and the impossible economics of the American dream, overflowing with humour, compassion and affection. Vargas’s Bronx is not a site of tragedy or despair, but a display of modern day life in all its messiness: complex, contradictory and deeply human. In an era when films about technology or immigration often feel heavy-handed or moralising, Mad Bills to Pay manages to navigate these issues with a confidence, a lightness and an ease that makes Vargas’s debut one of the most striking of the year.
