To rejoice in the anarchy without a first critical perspective on weapons culture or social media dependence is the point of director Oscar Boyson’s feature debut, “Our Hero, Balthazar,” together with Ricky Camillery, a film that wrestles with both subjects. The “Good Time” producer and “uncut gemstones” executive producers first film As a director, “Midnight Special” and “It” play Breakout Jaeden Martell as a spoiled New York City private-school Edgelord adept to cry on self-purchase for their online followers.
Balthazar’s (Martell) compulsion against tears due to Faux tears contributes to a broad satire of a constantly broader genre of curated suffering performed by social media users. Those leaning over causes (see Selena Gomez’s tearful direct-to-camera confession of Trump’s deportation policy, which went viral earlier this year) to signal their virtues, and often empty or at least confused.
Boyson Captures This Phenomenon, Mostly Poking Rather Than Prodding, Until The Film’s Dramatic and Very Bloody Finish Puts A Not Moralizing But Perhaps Prescriptive Cap on the EndGame of ITS OWN EXPANDER (“OUR HERO, BALLODS BALLANS BALLAS BALLAS BALLANS BALLAS BALLOWS BALLAS BALLAS BALLANS BALLAS BALLAS BALLAS” FOLLOWS “FOLLOWS” FOLLAGAR “FOLLOW FOLLAGEN” FOLLOWS BALLAS BALLAS. Perfectly Uptight, Power -Dressed Jennifer Ehle), Into a Dark Obsession with the Also Biblically Named Solomon (Asa Butterfield), an internet role with ambitions to postpone their Texas school and maybe more.
Balthy, however, does not have many virtues, and here is the world of Edgelords and Rage-Baiters online a lurking as cinematographer Christopher Messina and editors Nate Deyoung and Erin Dewitt throw us in with all the subtility of Safdies’ Clocking New York Crime “Good Time. Early Safdie films, now generational stones for new filmmakers.
Boyson does not peel completely away from Benny-and-Josh-established aesthetics, which is now the expected parlance of millennial film creators trying to capture an unsmakta, on Kant New York-Boyson, after all, founded Safdies’ Elara pictures before the brothers shared creatively. The stylized filmmaking becomes its own type of critical point of view here, wakes up the audience and probably even encourages some in the room to support their agonized worldview through the film’s convincing crafts. “Our hero, Balthazar” is both a precautionary story and an entertainment, and how Boyson extends across the Highwire cut between the two opposite forces is what makes this promising debut the most fascinating restless.
It is today, and when “our hero, Balthazar” begins, Balty cries into his iPhone camera. “This loneliness kills me,” he says. But it is all fakery, as staged as the active shooters at Balthy’s private Manhattan school, crocodile tears well to arms his narcissism against the bleeding hearts of passive, smash-the-freaking-like-like social media. Balthy is barely perceived by her single mother, Nicole (Ehle), who is so distracted by a romance with a rising policy (David M. Raine) that she goes out of the city with the guy on Balthy’s birthday weekend. At the same time, Balthy’s non -existent father only cuts the controls while he remains Upstate in Westchester.
Balty does not seem to have any social life outside internet interactions on the internet in his high -rise building overlooking the city. He is attracted by an activist classmate (Pippa Knowles), who sounds on “revenue generation of narcissism” after one of the school shooting drills, but he promotes her completely after trying to do with her while looking at dark web-disdisped closed circles of a real archery school. (As in last year’s ”Red rooms“If a woman who is perverse drawn to snuff films, Boyson keeps the carnage outside the camera and lets the sound of weapons popping and screaming belonged to our imagination.)
Balthy’s busy with school shooting joins him over Instagram exchanges with Texas-Dwelling convenience store workers Solomon, played by an unrecognizable butterfield in fairly pale blond hair in desperate need for a rinse of purple shampoo. Solomon is also alone, ignored by his father, a Frank Mackey type Motivational speakers who used to be an amateur porn star and now are a powder -shaped testosterone supplement called a thrush. The anxious teenager, who has far too much access to firearms and fantasizes about blowing up his peers, lives with his sick, Franzia-ven-Box grandmother (Becky Ann Baker, Lustig and sweaty limited to a light chair). He is disgusted with (and maybe in love with) his colleague, played by a scratchy funny Anna Baryshnikov who once again trashily steals the stage she did in “Love Lies Bleeding”, where as a lesbian stalker with gum inflammation.
So Balthy, who uses all the AI chic that is disturbing at its disposal, poses as a Nympho online female sex bot to attract Solomon’s attention via DMS and eventually meet him in a sad pocket in the countryside Texas. Balthy Goads Solomon’s formation Oedipal desire to murder his father, while warns when Solomon is suitable for killing, “it’s not even a school – no one will care.” Balthy, in the meantime, hopes that when he stopped Solomon’s parallel planned school shooting, he can somehow win back Affections of Eleanor (Knowles), which asks Balthy to stop reaching out but seemingly not learned to block a caller.
Is Balthy a hero? Is Solomon a murderer? Or are they both just hopelessly injured by an epidemic of over-intervening incel adequits that have transformed to be online on all these days into a pervasive existential risk? Believers and police distance Blerar and rays from Solomo’s grandmother’s TV, which gives “our hero, Balthazar” an constant-in-o-apocalypse vibe that brings our community-damaging fixation on spectacle violence and IF-IT-BLEEDS-IT-LEADS CABELYS, where the last tragedy is the recent tragedy is the recent tragedy.
Although it is hardly the case if you have been doing the latest harvest of Indians mixing New York-Night Thriller with Gen Z-skewer social messages (Olmo Schnabel’s Queer Manhattan Caper “Pet Shop Boys” from last year comes to mind), the contradictions of the exciting pleasures in this film’s crafts together with its dark comic warning letter about weapons culture make a potent in the end ambivalent first company. But it is ambivalence through design, when Boyson ends his film on a painfully inevitable, macyly fun final that gives the whole thing the whole circle, Balthy again crying on his own command for the whole world (or at least a handful of followers and news guards) to see.
Martell makes a strong dramatic impression as a seriously fucked child, but is he more fucked than any child-or any of us-is recently? It is Butterfield’s pathos and toxic Teenkom that gives “our hero, Balthazar” his emotional anchor, if the film has one at all. Boyson seems more fond of pyrotechnics for filmmaking-and as the first time function manager, why wouldn’t he be? – than with sticking to an emotional landing. “Our hero, Balthazar” is not cold in any way, but the result comes out as more ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the approach would suggest.
Rating: B-
“Our hero, Balthazar” premiered at 2025 Tribeca Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
