In a stray moment during Charlotte Zhang’s Tycoon, a young man says he stopped complaining to his landlord about the cockroaches invading his L.A. flat lest the whole building should be condemned—the same fate that’s felled countless others around the city, sealed and palmed off to rapacious property developers. Tycoon is set in the future: the year is 2028 and L.A. is gearing up for the Summer Olympics, and while deadly livestock viruses have made genetically modified bugs the country’s primary source of protein, a biblical cockroach infestation is triggering waves of domain abuses. But Zhang’s dystopia harks back to the past, to what Thomas Pynchon once called the “long, sad history of L.A. land use”—the way the city has always mutated at the speed of light, kicking out the poor to make room for the wealthy in a neverending cycle of displacement. Tycoon refracts some of that desperation but never succumbs to it; a rabid fury courses throughout, embodied by the film’s restless characters as much as its own prismatic form. Part-coming-of-age, part-political-thriller, Tycoon feels like it can detonate at any moment. “Something’s gonna happen soon,” a young woman prophesies halfway through. It’s a terrific précis.
Zhang, who was herself illegally evicted from her L.A. flat over a roach invasion, has cited Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep as a touchstone, and her feature debut, shot stop-start over weekends with friends, similarly unfolds as a series of vignettes rather than a linear, three-act plot. To the extent that Tycoon can be said to have one, the film concerns two young Angeleno grifters (Miguel Padilla-Juarez and Jon Lawrence Reyes) trying to survive and drum up cash as a couple of urban pirates. We watch them hijack delivery robots and feast on other people’s groceries, steal and resell insect powder ($60 a bag!), and dream up plans to flee the city once and for all.
But the film keeps getting distracted, zooming out of their antics to train its gaze on L.A. itself. Ominous radio announcements play over vestiges of the city’s past. There’s footage from August 1984, the last time L.A. hosted the Olympics; a faded postcard of the Mulholland Memorial Fountain; black-and-white drawings depicting some key chapters in California’s 20th century, from the gold rush to the labor strikes via the Great Depression. Throughout, Zhang disseminates title cards, not chapter headings so much as politicized slogans and battle cries—“Rehearsing the Republic,” “Everyone’s A Winner,” “Spit Down the Cliff Once You’ve Made It Up and Call it Rain”—splintering Tycoon the way intertitles did Godard’s works. Which is why Tycoon can sometimes feel like a proclamation as much as a movie. These are the people L.A. is pushing out, it says, and these are their stories, woven into decades of similar struggles over the right to stay: don’t let them die.
Like her listless characters, Zhang’s on a turf war of her own, carving out space for a cinema that need not abide by the dogmas of traditional narratives. Her Tycoon isn’t at all concerned with characterization; for all the thoughts Padilla-Juarez and Reyes share—some to each other, some to us through meditative voiceover—the boys remain deliberately opaque, little more than the sum of their inchoate fears and aspirations. Without ever being didactic, Tycoon is a testament to the way people are ineluctably shaped by their surroundings. It stands to reason that Zhang should couch the two friends as paranoid drifters fueled not by goals but an inordinate thirst for revenge. Revenge on what, though? The forces they’re up against are much bigger than the ordinary faces of local authority, and the film does an admirable job capturing that omnipresent, invisible danger—the way the air vibrates with bad omens. Tycoon flirts with genre trappings only to sidestep them altogether and become something more electrifying: a tempestuous archive of the city as seen by those shunted to its margins.
If the premise and Olympic backdrop recall Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina’s seminal Oiga Vea—a look at the 1971 Pan American Games hosted in Cali, Colombia, through the eyes of those too poor to access the stadiums—the film’s textures recall the febrile atmosphere and digital experimentation of David Lynch’s Inland Empire. It’s not just that the L.A. Zhang captures is a far cry from other postcard-friendly snapshots of the city (much of the “action” here unfurls in and around nondescript warehouses, backyards, and rooftops miles away from its glitziest districts). Zhang—who wrote, directed, edited, and shot the film—toggles between different sources, combining archival, iPhone, Super 8, and MiniDV footage into a mosaic that’s far less interested in fleshing out people than it is in interrogating the anxious mood that’s haunting them. Plagued by viruses, rising costs, and corrupt politicians, the city’s falling apart, and what’s so striking about Tycoon is the way its aesthetic responds to the inexorable collapse. Zhang’s camera is powered by a magpie curiosity for these peripheral areas, and her frames are alive to the nightmarish visions that pave them: cockroaches abound, but so do fires, nuclear sunsets, and spectral car rides, with clangorous noises and cavernous synths to match.
But Tycoon is no funereal march. The youths who Zhang singles out may only have a very vague idea of what they should fight against, yet their anger is no less earnest for it. And though her images have none of the glossy sheen you’ve come to expect from our current media regime, there is something almost seditious about their blurred, “imperfect” quality. They are “poor images,” in Hito Steyerl’s sense of the term: “popular” images “that can be made and seen by the many,” that “build alliances as [they] travel,” and blur the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author.
So much of Tycoon feels like life snatched on the fly; so many of its dialogues improvised exchanges. Zhang’s auspicious debut is primarily concerned with what it means to live in a city that both is and isn’t yours, and to reclaim the old stomping ground in the full knowledge of its inevitable disappearance. But all that melancholy is offset by the boisterous energy this film accrues. For a story about a metropolis in tatters and people trying to survive among the debris, Tycoon doesn’t end with surrender but a reappropriation: a late-night street takeover that sees cars joyously drifting around an intersection, and throngs of locals watching in wide-eyed stupor. “The end is near,” said a sign just moments earlier. But in that brief, ecstatic instant, the city is finally theirs.
Tycoon premiered at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam.