A ghostwriting job spirals into something far stranger in Big Gold Brick, a 2022 comedy-fantasy from director Brian Petsos that leans hard into absurdist, off-kilter storytelling.
What is Big Gold Brick about?
Samuel Liston is a young writer with more ambition than direction when a strange middle-aged father named Floyd Deveraux hires him to ghostwrite his life story. What starts as a straightforward biography assignment quickly unravels into something far odder, as Samuel is pulled into Floyd's chaotic household and the tangled, contradictory versions of his life that keep surfacing. The film hops between timelines and tones, mixing family dysfunction with surreal comic detours, so the biography Samuel is meant to be writing becomes less a record of facts and more a puzzle of memory, performance and unreliable storytelling. Along the way, an eccentric ensemble drifts in and out of Floyd's orbit, each adding another layer of confusion Samuel has to sort through before he can make sense of the man he has been hired to document.
About the cast
The ensemble includes Andy García, Emory Cohen, Megan Fox, Lucy Hale, Oscar Isaac, Shiloh Fernandez, Frederick Schmidt and Leonidas Castrounis, a mix of faces from prestige drama and mainstream genre work brought together for a film that asks them to play broad and strange rather than straight.
Context & significance
Big Gold Brick arrived as a co-production between Canada and the United States, part of a wave of independent films built around a distinctive directorial voice rather than a familiar franchise or formula. Petsos, working from his own script, favors a fragmented structure and a heightened, theatrical style of comedy that sets the film apart from more conventional biographical dramas or straightforward family comedies. Its blend of genres, comedy and fantasy stitched into a story about memory and identity, places it alongside other recent films that treat an unreliable narrator not as a twist but as the entire organizing principle of the storytelling.
Watching Big Gold Brick on Ktime
Big Gold Brick is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, no separate download or install required. The film streams with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, making its dense wordplay and offbeat structure easier to follow for Farsi-speaking viewers. K-Time's Farsi-first interface is built for the Iranian diaspora audience, so browsing, searching and picking up where you left off all work naturally in Persian alongside the English-language original.