Our Hero, Balthazar, 2025.
Directed by Oscar Boyson.
Starring Jaeden Martell, Asa Butterfield, Jennifer Ehle, Pippa Knowles, Chris Bauer, Anna Baryshnikov, Noah Centineo, Becky Ann Baker, Avan Jogia, David M. Raine, Abby Pauly, and Will River.
SYNOPSIS:
Follows a wealthy New York City teenager who, eager to impress his activist crush, follows an online connection to Texas where he believes he can stop an act of extreme violence.
Everyone wants to be a part of a community. For the silver-spoon eponymous Balthazar (Jaeden Martell, playing what will be hard to top as the peak of troubled youth he has excelled at in his career thus far), a high school teenager so rich and mostly left to his own devices by his his politically- adjacent single mother (Jennifer Ehle), leaving most of the parenting to life coach Anthony (Noah Centineo), he is the outcast with no friends, using his talent of force-crying on social media on the subject of school shootings to generate some sympathy, pity, or general attention.
Titled Our Hero, Balthazar, and directed with scintillating shock and a rawness toward real-world issues by Oscar Boyson (co-writing the screenplay alongside Ricky Camilleri), Balthazar is also socially maladjusted and sees the possibility of stopping one as a ticket for life to acceptance, popularity, and heroism (no matter how misguided). He also believes that it will impress his activist crush, Eleanor (Pippa Knowles).
Elsewhere (and I refuse to get into how these stories tie into one another, even if the trailer spoils some of it, because that unpredictable force and sense of danger seeping its way into every scene as part of what makes this film so bold and special toward psychologically analyzing specific types of lonely men), is Asa Butterfield as Solomon, a gun-toting, white trash, cartoon porn addict looking to reconnect with his estranged father (Chris Bauer) and learn the ways of grifting a testosterone boosting product to impress him and pay the bills for the land that the trailer where he lives with his grandmother (Becky Ann Baker) resides.
The character may or may not be a school shooter, hence Balthazar’s obsession from a distance. His performance isn’t just astonishingly transformative when unrecognizable, but one of those turns that entirely shreds the boyish looks and family-friendly persona he had before this. One comes away confident that Asa Butterfield is capable of any role and performance.
What this story entails is sometimes disturbingly funny, zeroing in not only on how hopelessly pathetic these two men of different ages and social statuses are (the ending also maximizes this for some thought-provoking commentary), but also on the horrifying ways people can manipulate one another online and in person. The emphasis is slightly heavier on the side of what technology and social media have come to, and how the power it puts into the hands of the most sociopathic has only been amplified with the growing presence of AI.
Somehow, the filmmakers skirt the obvious elephant in the room that both of these characters are detestable, finding gonzo thrills in their absurd misadventures. It helps that the writing isn’t preachy about calling these guys losers. That is right there in the storytelling and their actions, with us piecing together how they might have become like this and what there is to take away from the experience (again, something I’d rather not spoil, but the ultimate message here is one of immensely harsh, mean-spirited, darkly funny, accurately blunt truth). Admittedly, this aspect is more concerned with Solomon, whereas Balthazar’s past remains somewhat elusive and broad, with no clear indication of what fractured his mind and made him such an alienating, unsettling kid in the first place.
Where Our Hero, Balthazar, goes from its initial setup is irrelevant to a review; all that needs to be said is that this is a wild yet grounded and eye-opening ride into the lives of damaged individuals. Learning that this film played Tribeca last year before Eddington had been released is both surprising and not; it feels like an entire movie built around the premise of bored teenagers taking up a cause, hoping to get laid, yet fully with its own voice without coming across as a knockoff of that plot point.
Yes, at times, there are also so many ideas at play here that it also feels as if Oscar Boyson and Ricky Camilerri never fully take advantage of them, and a case could be made that other tantalizing routes for the narrative to go exist. However, the road traveled is still more than unhinged enough, as Our Hero, Balthazar, is a harrowing take on male loneliness, terminal online social-media brainrot, faux activism, and fractured family relations. It’s an invitation to laugh and be horrified equally.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
