It’s hard to tell whether this condo ad is terrible or amazing

Here’s one definite sign that there’s way too much extra money sloshing around in the housing market at the moment: some sellers, looking for novel ways to market their properties, are commissioning short films.

Take three minutes and give this one a watch. (It’s embedded below.) The film is supposed to promote a $2.15-million penthouse at 318 King Street East, a condo building in the St. Lawrence Market area. The goal of most real estate advertising is to get potential buyers to picture themselves in a home, but this short takes the opposite approach: it invents a fictional person and pictures him in the home, instead. So, that’s a little strange.

Stranger still, rather than invent a generic person that any buyer could relate to, the film imagines the penthouse being occupied by, basically, an asshole—a suit-wearing banker guy who gets waited on, hand and foot, by his girlfriend, who is very clumsy and constantly spilling things on her clothes, forcing her to change into new and sexier clothes. The overall message seems to be: pay us $2.15 million and this nightmare could be your life.

These marketing movies are a specialty of realtor Karyn Filiatrault, whose online bio says she developed her filmmaking chops during a previous career as a documentarian and TV producer. She has made a few of these things over the years. They’re pretty weird, but then again everything that makes them bizarre also makes them interesting, which is why they’re getting free press right now. So maybe this is actually a brilliant way of attracting attention to a listing and we’re being played. Or, scarier thought: maybe this was an earnest attempt to tap into the psyche of the type of dude who would spend seven figures on a two-bedroom pad with a putting green.