The Scout Review: What Do You Really Want?

Paula Andrea González-Nasser’s The Scout effortlessly captures the moments of quiet contemplation that arise when trying to figure out one’s path.

While you may think you’re acting in the name of your future, you may not even realize the impact it’s having on the present-day version of you as your identity is now so deeply embedded in your career. Paula Andrea González-Nasser’s debut feature film, The Scout, takes a sensitive gaze into the life of a woman who is so enraptured in her career that she has lost sight of who she truly is and what she really wants. 

The Scout follows Sofia (Mimi Davila, of Problemista), a trained photographer working as a location scout for a TV show shooting in New York City. Sofia is relatively low on the totem pole at her job; while she searches all over New York for locations, each one she finds seems to never be good enough for the creative team’s constantly changing ideas.

Putting up or handing out dozens of flyers a day, asking to use people’s homes or businesses for the show, Sofia’s life, and voicemail inbox, has been taken over by her job. As she goes to review locations to shoot in, she enters the lives of families, singletons and business owners alike. Due to the intimate nature of photographing their spaces, Sofia is often confided in and expected to appease the strangers whose lives she is forced to enter in the name of the production. 

The Scout is based on writer/director González-Nasser’s real-life experience as a location scout for projects shot around New York. González-Nasser’s film feels like a sensitive and intentional glance into a particular moment of uncertainty that, while uber specific situationally, is universally understood. 

As a character, Sofia feels just beyond reach. While we’re with her throughout the entire duration of the film, there’s a palpable disconnect between the audience and her. This further emphasises Sofia’s disconnect from herself. She says she’s happy when she clearly is not, but refuses to acknowledge the root of her discomfort within her life.

She constantly puts herself and her job down, discredits her own accomplishments and changes the subject any time attention is put on her. Her discontentment with her day-to-day is a small-scale representation of how lost she feels in the grand scheme of her life. 

In front of the creative team, no one listens to her, but in front of the people whose homes she’s photographing, everyone divulges their own deepest truths to her. She’s stuck between these moments of being completely ignored and totally trusted, making it hard to navigate how to present herself. 

González-Nasser masterfully captures Sofia’s particular strand of contemplativeness. She beautifully writes her as a character that outwardly seems settled into herself, but in reality is deeply uncomfortable in her own skin. Mimi Davila embodies Sofia with a quiet ease and a fierce sense of understanding for where this woman is in her life. 

While The Scout does serve as a stripped-back look at the unseen side of filmmaking, its power comes from its exploration of identity and how the search to understand oneself is constantly evolving. González-Nasser’s movie is stylistically eloquent and emotionally stirring. It’s an honest look at how we avoid trying to do the work to figure out who we are when we know we don’t have the answers. It will push you to look at your life and ask yourself what it is you really want to do and who it is you really want to be. 

The Scout was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 5, 2025 and will be screened again on June 6-15.