Nearly everybody in Hombre al agua is performing for somebody, whether it’s a camera crew, a campaign consultant, or a spouse who has stopped listening. Gael García Bernal’s frantic, big-hearted third feature as director never lets that idea rest for long, circling it from so many angles that the film starts to feel less like a family drama and more like a hall of mirrors with really good bone structure.

García Bernal stars as Camilo, a Cuban lifeguard whose life changes the moment he pulls a drowning Mexican businessman, Abel (Jorge Salinas), out of the water. Grateful beyond reason, Abel flies Camilo to Mérida, sets him up at his largest factory and treats him like the son he never had, a role Camilo eventually makes official by marrying Abel’s daughter, Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel), a pole vaulter. The marriage sours fast, partly because Camilo throws himself into growing Abel’s company with the single-mindedness of a man trying to earn a place he was never quite sure he’d been given.

That insecurity curdles into chaos once Abel, badly hurt in an accident, has a roadside epiphany: he wants to sell the factory, run for governor on an environmental platform, and lean on Camilo, his humble common-man proof of concept, to help sell it. Layoffs Camilo never wanted to make land on his desk anyway. Abel’s mistress, very pregnant and very unhappy, moves into Camilo’s guest room. A visiting Brazilian actress, Fabiana (Débora Nascimento), a method performer studying Juana’s pole vaulting for a role, starts asking Camilo unnervingly personal questions. Someone is lurking around the property at night. None of it lets up.

Thematically, this is where Hombre al agua gets genuinely interesting. Nearly every strand of the plot involves somebody staging something: when Fabiana’s own film, the reason she’s shadowing Juana in the first place, falls apart, Juana channels the disappointment into writing, directing, and financing a film “based on” her own privileged life, one explicitly designed to launder her family’s image. The factory quietly stages a pro-union documentary to blow off steam before the real layoffs hit. Abel stages campaign ads. And Camilo, a man who has spent the entire film being told, sometimes to his face, that he’s a social climber and a performer, eventually ends up literally cast as a version of himself, rehearsing lines about his own marriage in front of the woman he’s supposedly speaking to. It’s a sharp, funny, occasionally biting idea about how the wealthy don’t just buy comfort; they buy narrative control, and about how exhausting it is to live inside a story other people keep rewriting around you.

Pulling off writing, directing and starring in the same film is a notoriously wobbly balancing act, and credit to García Bernal for resisting the urge to make Camilo a saint. He plays the character’s compromises and blind spots honestly, which makes him easy to root for without ever making him easy to fully trust. Nascimento is the film’s most magnetic presence, finding real ache underneath Fabiana’s glamour, and Ricky Martin, in a small but well-placed role as the actor briefly hired to play Camilo in Juana’s film, gets some of the movie’s best comic mileage before making an exit.

The comedy throughout is loose and physical, from a very funny opening bedroom scene through Camilo and Juana’s constant bickering to Camilo wandering, again and again, directly into the path of somebody else’s camera. It’s a film that moves.

Maybe too much. Hombre al agua is a film stuffed with ideas, and a handful of its bigger swings, particularly Juana’s film-within-the-film, arrive and escalate so quickly that they never get enough room to breathe; entire arcs feel sketched rather than finished. Some of the dialogue leans on tidy little monologues and conveniently well-timed philosophical asides that sit a little too neatly in characters’ mouths to feel fully lived-in. It’s the kind of overstuffed ambition that comes from a filmmaker with more ideas than runtime, more forgivable than fatal, and it never fully derails the film’s sharpest instincts.

So while Hombre al agua doesn’t resolve every thread it pulls, it’s rarely boring watching it try. It also leaves plenty of curiosity about where García Bernal, directing with real confidence here alongside longtime collaborator and producer Diego Luna, goes next.