To enjoy anarchy with out an preliminary crucial perspective about gun tradition or social media dependancy is the purpose of director Oscar Boyson’s characteristic debut, “Our Hero, Balthazar,” co-written with Ricky Camilleri, a film wrestling with each subjects. The “Good Time” producer and “Uncut Gems” govt producer‘s first movie as a director stars “Midnight Particular” and “It” breakout Jaeden Martell as a spoiled New York Metropolis private-school edgelord adept at making himself cry on self-cue for his on-line followers.
Balthazar’s (Martell) compulsion towards on-iPhone fake tears contributes to a broad satire of an ever-widening style of curated struggling wrought by social media customers. Those who lather themselves up over causes (see Selena Gomez’s tearful direct-to-camera confession about Trump’s deportation insurance policies, which went viral earlier this yr) to sign their virtues, and infrequently emptily or a minimum of confused.
Boyson captures this phenomenon, principally poking moderately than prodding, till the movie’s dramatic and really bloody end places a not moralizing however maybe prescriptive cap on the endgame of its personal increasing satire: “Our Hero, Balthazar” follows Balthy, as he’s recognized by his absentee mom (a wonderfully uptight, power-dressed Jennifer Ehle), right into a darkish obsession with the additionally biblically named Solomon (Asa Butterfield), an web troll with aspirations of capturing up his Texas college and perhaps extra.
Balthy, although, doesn’t have many virtues, and right here the world of edgelords and on-line rage-baiters is a scuzzy one which cinematographer Christopher Messina and editors Nate DeYoung and Erin DeWitt plunge us into with all of the subtlety of the Safdies’ clock-ticking New York crime odyssey “Good Time.” The synthy, pulsing electro artwork rating by James William Blades additional brings to thoughts these early Safdie motion pictures, now generational touchstones for rising filmmakers.
Boyson doesn’t solely peel away from the Benny-and-Josh-established aesthetic that’s now the anticipated parlance of millennial filmmakers searching for to seize an unvarnished, on-edge New York — Boyson, in any case, co-founded the Safdies’ Elara Photos earlier than the brothers cut up creatively. The stylized filmmaking turns into its personal kind of crucial perspective right here, revving up the viewers and doubtless encouraging even a number of within the room to endorse its agonized worldview by way of the film’s compelling craft. “Our Hero, Balthazar” is each a cautionary story and an leisure, and the way Boyson straddles the highwire reducing between these two opposing forces is what makes this promising debut most fascinatingly stressed.
It’s current day, and when “Our Hero, Balthazar” begins, Balthy is weeping into his iPhone digital camera. “This loneliness is killing me,” he says. However it’s all fakery, as staged because the active-shooter drills at Balthy’s personal Manhattan college, crocodile tears welled as much as weaponize his narcissism in opposition to the bleeding hearts of passive, smash-the-freaking-like-button social media sheep. Balthy is barely attended to by his single mother, Nicole (Ehle), who’s so distracted by a romance with a rising politico (David M. Raine) that she goes out of city with the man on Balthy’s birthday weekend. In the meantime, Balthy’s nonexistent father simply cuts the checks whereas remaining upstate in Westchester.
Balthy seems to don’t have any social life outdoors the internet-only interactions inside his high-rise bed room overlooking town. He’s drawn to an activist classmate (Pippa Knowles), who sounds off on the “monetization of narcissism” after a kind of school-shooting drills, however he alienates her solely after attempting to make out together with her whereas watching dark-web-dispatched closed-circuit footage of an precise Arkansas college bloodbath. (As in final yr’s “Pink Rooms,” a few lady perversely drawn to snuff movies, Boyson retains the carnage off-camera, letting the sounds of weapons popping and screams overheard ooze into our creativeness.)
Balthy’s preoccupation with college shootings entwines him over Instagram exchanges with Texas-dwelling comfort retailer employee Solomon, performed by an unrecognizable Butterfield in brassy bleach-blond hair in determined want of a rinse of purple shampoo. Solomon is lonely, too, ignored by his father, a Frank Mackey-type motivational speaker who was an novice porn star and now peddles a powdery testosterone complement known as Thrush. The angsty teen, who’s received far an excessive amount of entry to firearms and fantasizes about blowing up his friends, lives together with his ailing, Franzia-wine-box-guzzling grandmother (Becky Ann Baker, hilarious and sweatily confined to a simple chair). He’s loathed by (and maybe in love with) his coworker, performed by a crassly humorous Anna Baryshnikov who once more trashily steals the scene as she did in “Love Lies Bleeding,” there as a lesbian stalker with gingivitis.
So Balthy, utilizing all of the AI chicanery disturbingly at his disposal, poses as a nympho on-line feminine intercourse bot to lure Solomon’s consideration by way of DMs and to ultimately meet up with him in a tragic pocket of rural Texas. Balthy goads Solomon’s forming Oedipal need to homicide his father, whereas cautioning as Solomon fits up for the kill, “It’s not even a faculty — no person’s gonna care.” Balthy, in the meantime, hopes that in stopping Solomon’s parallel deliberate college capturing he can one way or the other win again the affections of Eleanor (Knowles), who begs Balthy to cease reaching out however seemingly hasn’t realized how one can block a caller.
Is Balthy a hero? Is Solomon a assassin? Or are they each simply hopeless casualties of an epidemic of over-interneted incel-adjacents who’ve turned being on-line in any respect nowadays right into a pervasive existential threat? Automotive chases and police standoffs blare and beam from Solomon’s grandmother’s TV, giving “Our Hero, Balthazar” an ever-on-the-edge-of-apocalypse vibe that literalizes our society-addling fixation on spectacle violence and if-it-bleeds-it-leads cable information, the place the final tragedy is the most recent information merchandise.
Although hardly transgressive should you’ve saved up with the latest crop of indies that mix New York-at-night thriller with Gen Z-skewering social messaging (Olmo Schnabel’s queer Manhattan caper “Pet Store Boys” from final yr involves thoughts), the contradictions within the thrilling pleasures of this movie’s craft alongside its darkly comedian warning letter about gun tradition make for a potent if in the end ambivalent first enterprise. However it’s ambivalence by design, as Boyson ends his film on a painfully inevitable, macabrely humorous finale that brings the entire thing full circle, Balthy as soon as once more crying on his personal command for all of the world (or a minimum of a handful of followers and information watchers) to see.
Martell makes a robust dramatic impression as a severely fucked-up child, however is he extra fucked-up than any child — or any of us — is currently? It’s Butterfield’s pathos and poisonous teendom that give “Our Hero, Balthazar” its emotional anchor, if the movie has one in any respect. Boyson appears extra enamored with the pyrotechnics of filmmaking — and as a first-time characteristic director, why wouldn’t he be? — than with sticking to an emotional touchdown. “Our Hero, Balthazar” isn’t chilly by any means, however the end result comes off as extra ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the strategy would counsel.
Grade: B-
“Our Hero, Balthazar” premiered on the 2025 Tribeca Pageant. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.