Sofia (Mimi Davila) wakes up, gets in her car, and drives all around New York City and surrounding areas, looking at the insides of potential locations for a TV production, snapping pictures and dropping flyers. She has a glove compartment full of orange traffic tickets, a perpetually brimming voicemail box, at least two straps slung around her shoulder at any given time, and a practiced routine of making small talk (“I know what you mean” makes multiple appearances). The Scout follows her for almost exactly one day, maybe a little more. The contours of her routine, however unpredictable in their details, emerge with startling clarity. At one point, it seems like the audience anticipates some additional car trouble she’s about to have. In some movies, this would be frustrating. In The Scout, it feels as if deep down, Sofia might have sensed it, too. But what can she do to prevent it without screwing up two or three other components of her day?
It is easy to picture a version of this movie that’s a meta-winking, entertainment-industry comedy of errors, a ground-level version of shows The Studio or The Franchise, with Sofia laboring at the service of fickle, dismissive, and/or maddening “creative” teams who can’t together make a single coherent decision. A couple of those non-decision scenes do emerge, raising another possibility: Maybe this is a horror movie during which Sofia will understandably snap and murder everyone in the room who nixes an apartment for looking “dusty” or having an “ugly door.” But during the 24 hours and change we spend with Sofia, nothing really comes to a head. It’s more of a ridealong on her unusual beat.
Writer-director Paula González-Nasser, a former location scout herself, rigorously avoids unnatural exposition. We learn a little bit about Sofia’s background when she realizes one of her scouting locations is an apartment belonging to an old friend she hasn’t seen in some time. But it wouldn’t make sense for these two people to recap what, precisely, caused their estrangement, and so we are left to wonder. Tension hangs over this scene, and many others; the effect is not unlike Kitty Green’s similarly New York-set, industry-centric The Assistant, though Sofia’s job is less wrenching.
This doesn’t inure her from the uncomfortable advances of men who see a young woman of few immediate resources, and flatter themselves into interpreting her interest in their apartments as something more. One chillingly unresolved scene puts her opposite a friendly-seeming dad who advances inexorably toward crossing a line. González-Nasser keeps the camera at a distance and, as she does throughout the film, separates Sofia in her own frames. The dad voice, disembodied and off-screen, serves as a cue for the impending discomfort. Other scenes, like Sofia’s encounter with her old friend, are reminiscent of the recent films of Hong Sang-soo, where characters quietly address relationship issues that can appear minute, even microscopic, but strangely compelling.
There are moments when the film slides a little too far in either direction. It’s bookended by the kinds of shots beloved by American independent cinema: The long, static take of not much happening. (At the end, it’s a visual cliché. At the beginning of the movie, it’s practically a dare: Can you hook into a movie that begins with an extended medium shot of a figure sleeping and her boyfriend gently nudging her awake?) Another scene, where Sofia accepts a dinner invitation to smooth things over with a location contact in a snit, shows González-Nasser’s facility in writing a bad date, but it’s such a foregone conclusion that it doesn’t add much.
Most of The Scout, however, is both sharper and less obviously conclusive than that. González-Nasser offers glimpses of what might make the work rewarding enough to stick with, and, with it, how elusive those feelings must be. And Davila gives one of those performances that might initially appear to be doing very little, until it’s clear that she’s actually doing just about everything, mastering an unaffected realism that makes Sofia an easy rooting interest without stacking the deck. “One thing I like about your generation,” an older person tells Sofia at one point, “is that you have no sense of time.” As with the car mishap, Sofia doesn’t seem unaware of time so much as unsure of how to navigate besides moving forward. The Scout stays with her in the antsy, dwindling present.
The Scout will play again at the Tribeca Festival on June 13, 14, and 15.
Director: Paula González-Nasser Writer: Paula González-Nasser Starring: Mimi Davila, Rutanya Alda, Max Rosen, Ikechukwu Ufomadu, Sarah Herrman, Otmara Marrero, Matt Barats Release Date: June 5. 2025 (Tribeca Festival)
