Serious People: A Meta Music Video Satire That Loses Its Own Beat
The premise of Serious People is so brilliantly absurd it should work: Pasqual Gutierrez plays himself, a successful music video director who hires a doppelganger to take his place at work while he prepares for fatherhood. The fact that this involves directing a Drake comeback video adds another layer of meta hilarity that feels even more surreal given recent real-world events.
Directors Gutierrez and Ben Mullinkosson blur every line they can find – between documentary and fiction, between the real Pasqual and his body-double Miguel (Miguel Huerta), between genuine family tension and scripted drama. Gutierrez's actual wife Christine Yuan plays herself, and when she argues with him about being absent during her pregnancy, she admits those were real feelings about him making this very film.
The film's best moments come from its commitment to naturalistic awkwardness. Long, unbroken takes capture the bizarre reality of training your replacement to be you, especially when that replacement is more interested in flexing his muscles than learning about aspect ratios. There's genuine comedy gold in watching Miguel try to navigate production meetings, bringing swagger where subtlety is needed.
But at 84 minutes, Serious People still feels overlong, stretching its one-joke premise past breaking point. The film captures the absurdity of the entertainment industry's grindset culture – where hiring a body double seems reasonable if it means not missing a Drake video – but doesn't know what to do with that observation. It's insider baseball that assumes we care about the players.
The improvisational feel that initially charms eventually becomes a liability. You can feel the filmmakers discovering their movie as they make it, which creates spontaneous moments of brilliance but no cohesive vision. When it ends abruptly, you're left wondering what the point was beyond "the entertainment industry is ridiculous" – a revelation that feels about as fresh as yesterday's craft services.