Micro Budget Review: A Blisteringly Funny Satire of Making Movies on the Cheap

Chances are that if you've made any kind of career in show business, you've found yourself on a nightmarish set run by a tyrant with no discernible skills. At least once. Micro Budget, the blisteringly funny mockumentary from Patrick Noth and Morgan Evans is packed with superstar improvisers, immortalizing the no-budget film set life through the eyes and ears of a team of the stupidest possible people. It's a deliriously perfect, laugh-a-second satire.

Noth co-wrote the film and stars as Terry, a moronic director with zero experience and the harebrained idea that he can shoot a film for cheap only to sell it for millions to a streamer. It's not clear just yet where the financing for the film is coming from, such as it exists, but it is clear that whatever money he does have is being stretched to its absolute limit. The actors are here on the precarious promise of money on the back end; the caterer, Jasmine (Carla Jimenez) is serving rotted cabbages, untoasted white bread and a bowl of mayonnaise for lunch; and the set is an AirBnB that has expressly forbid shooting.

Micro Budget Is The First Great Mockumentary in Years

Erica (Noth's real life wife Emilea Wilson), on the verge of giving birth, supports her husband's lofty dreams to the point that she is debasing herself, cleaning up broken glass and cooking a feast for dinner without so much as a lifted finger of help. As much as it hurts to see Terry find new ways to be a bad partner, it is equally as funny to watch Wilson do her best to hold it all together. The little crew that exists is both incompetent and incredulous; unspoken in the film is the implicit suggestion of Hollywood's depleted economy, with most of the film's employees working in spite of their better judgment for lack of work elsewhere.

Amongst that crew is Chris (Jon Gabrus), Terry's AD, who is smart enough to know Terry is in above his head but not smart enough to walk away. Like many of the actors here, Gabrus comes from the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) factory and has been a long-running guest on Scott Aukerman's comedy podcast institution Comedy Bang! Bang!, and here he punctuates many scenes with absurd one-liners or else self-deprecating zingers.

On the cast side, Terry has, by his own words, assembled as diverse a cast as possible in order to sell the movie better, proudly boasting of his inherent racism. The film's two leads, Jenny (Nichole Sakura) and Garry (Brandon Micheal Hall), have such clear chemistry that they openly talk about when they might run off and have sex, but Terry is so bluntly attracted to the former that he cancels his own plans the shoot on-screen romance just to sabotage the actors' budding relationship. "I have no choice but to make Garry fat," he muses out loud, in an apparent attempt to make his male lead less attractive.

For such a short film it's astonishing how much happens. At one point, Terry hires Brett (SNL writer Neil Casey), an intimacy coordinator who is, ironically, being investigated for sexual assault, and who looks like the Tiger King. The host of the AirBnB, Toby (Chris Parnell) finds out there's a film happening, assumes it's a porno, threatens police action, before letting it lie so long as his girlfriend, Darby (Maria Bamford) can be given a cameo (which she does with hilariously bad aplomb).

As to the plot of the film within the film, Terry has penned a late 1990s style disaster whereby the city of Toronto is destroyed by meteor. Just about the opposite subgenre for a workable microbudget feature. Rick, the visual effects supervisor (Bobby Moynihan), is effectively using Clip Art to simulate the catastrophe. But the real crux of Micro Budget is everything that happens in between the takes, as filmed by Devin (Evans), a documentarian putting together a behind-the-scenes featurette for the film's planned DVD release.

In those moments, the film becomes the satirical version of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. The reality of the film is never in question, but like William Greaves' masterpiece, we do question whose reality we are living in. Terry is cartoonishly evil and buffoonish, but is he wrong to dream of living in a different reality? Definitely not at the expense of his future child's life, or that of his devoted wife. But this is Hollywood, baby. Some sacrifices must be made.

Micro Budget releases in select theaters on February 28th, 2026.