Skyrocketing housing prices. Disappearing affordable units. Encampment evictions and overflowing shelters.
For many residents of Toronto, the city’s housing crisis has spiralled to insurmountable heights. And like chronic back pain or the climate crisis, many of us have simply learned to live with its impacts. After all, it’s easier to simply look away and hope things get better, even as they demonstrably get worse.
Serious Buyers Only, a new short film that’s streaming for free on YouTube, finds plenty of material ripe for satire in the nightmare. Directed by Samuel Larson and starring an ensemble of actors and comedians — including Larson’s wife and creative partner Julie Nolke — it uses its brisk 22-minute run time to paint a bleak portrait of a city ravaged by the grotesque self-interest and apathy of its middle- and upper-classes.
The film opens as a predatory real estate agent — played with pitch-perfect smarm by Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll (Blackberry, Priscilla) — attempts to remove an unhoused person from an empty downtown lot slated for development. Unsuccessful, the realtor hides them beneath a large “FOR SALE” placard. It’s a clever but grim bit of symbolism, setting the tone for a cast of characters who consistently fail to consider the humanity of the city’s vulnerable population, whose unseen presence floats like a spectre as the film’s drama unfolds.
We then meet our two protagonists: Ginny, played by Nolke, and Ryan, played by Andrew Bushnell (Dinner With Friends). A millennial couple with a baby on the way, Ginny and Ryan are on the hunt for an affordable home near Toronto’s downtown core, with “our own backyard” and “our own front door.”
Despite the many red flags about this new urban development — an essentially barren plot of land with a single show house — the smarmy realtor makes quick work of Ginny and Ryan, asking them to close their eyes as he conjures visions of domestic bliss.
“You’re not just another card in a deck, on a stack, smelling other people’s cooking,” he tells them, as a rose-tinted dream sequence shows a shirtless Ryan, flipping burgers while swaddling a newborn infant. “No, I want you to have Versailles.”
But as Ryan and Ginny prepare to make an offer, their plans are spoiled by the arrival of Charlotte and Bryce Blackburn, a wealthy father-daughter duo played by Nicole Power (Kim’s Convenience) and Greg Ellwand (Handmaid’s Tale), who offer to purchase the land at a higher price. From there, the film quickly descends into an increasingly absurd, slapstick grudge match between the entitled young couple and the covetous investors.
A cynical but deftly maneuvered satire, Serious Buyers Only is far more political than Larson and Nolke’s light-hearted comedy sketches that made them YouTube sensations during the pandemic.
In a chat with The Grind, Larson says the idea for this film, which was self-funded, emerged from a sense of “survivor’s guilt” after he and Nolke were able to purchase a home in Toronto — something that remains out of reach for their creative peers.
Set in an only slightly exaggerated version of Toronto, there’s an undeniable pleasure in watching the film skewer a number of juicy, low-hanging targets: the greedy real estate developers, the unscrupulous investors, and the “not in my backyard” types (NIMBYs) who want the luxury of urban life without having to live among vulnerable or unhoused populations.
And though Larson and co-writer Alex McKay don’t seem particularly interested in diagnosing the root causes of Toronto’s housing crisis (nor do they attempt to offer a solution or path forward), the film does offer an interesting critique of the enduring fantasy of homeownership — an anachronistic vision of adulthood that remains stubbornly lodged in the millennial psyche. It’s a vision, the film suggests, whether intentionally or not, that positions us as prey for corporate interests, while preventing us from building a different future.
“Some of us gave up on the idea of truly owning anything,” the realtor tells Ginny and Ryan in a mask-off moment near the end of the film. “Now we just broker the idea of it.”
Watch Serious Buyers Only on YouTube:
