Tribeca Review: The Scout Finds Comedy in Monotony

For her debut, writer-director Paula Andrea González-Nasser chose to explore an oft-forgotten role in the filmmaking process: the location scout. The Scout follows Sofia (Mimi Davila), a location scout seeking the ideal apartment during a typical day in her life: driving around New York City, walking in and out of apartments, meeting with friends, strangers, and a demanding TV crew. González-Nasser captures something essential about Sofia’s life: the exhaustion. The film, more comedy than drama, breaks both the viewer and Sofia down in equal parts, pushing either to continue this never-ending day, showing the pressure of a job that many others tell her is “so cool.”

Davila shines in the role, making herself small with oddballs and charismatic when needing to convince a fish-store owner to stay open for five more minutes. Each passing location and misstep––her fault, the city’s, or her boss’––exemplifies how much of an afterthought she is to those around her, which Davila increasingly and silently expresses. But she’s determined even as her work is increasingly overlooked and then diminished, even if her efforts are paramount to the success of this supposed TV pilot. She’s exasperated yet unwilling to slow down, with Davila balancing the two sides of Sofia in each scene.

Nothing much of substantial narrative impact happens in The Scout. It’s a hodgepodge of experiences, of pop-ins and run-ins, of taking photos while hearing about someone’s marriage, someone’s dog, or someone’s daughter. Each scene feels like it happened to González-Nasser during her time as a location scout, a job she had for six years in NYC, working for TV shows on HBO and Hulu, along with indie projects that required her to do the exact same motion as Sofia: knocking on endless doors. The film becomes lived-in, leaning towards the monotony of this job rather than the perceived glamour and excitement of working in film and television. It finds laughs in this monotony, in the things that people will tell a location scout simply because it’s another person sitting in their living room. 

González-Nasser invites an openness from these characters, each given one scene with Sofia, to banter with her, make her uncomfortable, or some combination of the two. And the young location scout just takes it all in stride, as though she’s been in these situations countless times, as each apartment is a part of her job she doesn’t love, but also doesn’t mind. She might even relish it on one or two occasions, the opportunity to sit on someone’s couch and hear their story or to find a new hack to delete her mountain of parking tickets. 

Some of these supporting performances are better than others, but they don’t all necessarily need to be full of electricity. They can be mundane or stilted––that’s what these interactions are for a location scout. González-Nasser puts just enough flair behind the camera to keep things moving and the audience’s minds from wandering, even though she often prefers to keep the camera at a distance. The audience becomes a fly-on-the-wall of apartments throughout multiple boroughs, observing what people do when they’re inside their homes in the middle of the day. 

The Scout shows González-Nasser’s ability to write work both specific yet relatable, especially for those early in their careers. Most people have been in similar rooms like the production meeting late in the film, even though González-Nasser makes clear that it’s much different for a woman of color in a white, male-dominated field. But there’s a universality in being unseen, in one’s work being tossed aside after spending the entire day (or week or month) on a single project. With Davila giving that relatability in each scene, the film finds solid footing, telling a story that’s modest but surely a success. 

The Scout premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival.

The post Tribeca Review: The Scout Finds Comedy in Monotony first appeared on The Film Stage.