‘Our Hero, Balthazar' Review: Jaeden Martell Is an Edgelord Obsessed with a Would-Be School Shooter in ‘Good Time' Producer's Angsty Debut

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2 days ago

To revel in anarchy without an initial critical perspective about gun culture or social media addiction is the point of director Oscar Boyson's feature debut, 'Our Hero, Balthazar,' co-written with Ricky Camilleri, a movie wrestling with both topics. The 'Good Time' producer and 'Uncut Gems' executive producer's first film as a director stars 'Midnight Special' and 'It' breakout Jaeden Martell as a spoiled New York City private-school edgelord adept at making himself cry on self-cue for his online followers.
Balthazar's (Martell) compulsion toward on-iPhone faux tears contributes to a broad satire of an ever-widening genre of curated suffering wrought by social media users. The ones who lather themselves up over causes (see Selena Gomez's tearful direct-to-camera confession about Trump's deportation policies, which went viral earlier this year) to signal their virtues, and often emptily or at least confused.
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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 expanding satire: 'Our Hero, Balthazar' follows Balthy, as he's known by his absentee mother (a perfectly uptight, power-dressed Jennifer Ehle), into a dark obsession with the also biblically named Solomon (Asa Butterfield), an internet troll with aspirations of shooting up his Texas school and maybe more.
Balthy, though, doesn't have many virtues, and here the world of edgelords and online rage-baiters is a scuzzy one that cinematographer Christopher Messina and editors Nate DeYoung and Erin DeWitt plunge us into with all the subtlety of the Safdies' clock-ticking New York crime odyssey 'Good Time.' The synthy, pulsing electro art score by James William Blades further brings to mind those early Safdie movies, now generational touchstones for emerging filmmakers.
Boyson doesn't entirely peel away from the Benny-and-Josh-established aesthetic that's now the expected parlance of millennial filmmakers seeking to capture an unvarnished, on-edge New York — Boyson, after all, co-founded the Safdies' Elara Pictures before the brothers split creatively. The stylized filmmaking becomes its own sort of critical point of view here, revving up the audience and probably encouraging even a few in the room to endorse its agonized worldview via the movie's compelling craft. 'Our Hero, Balthazar' is both a cautionary tale and an entertainment, and how Boyson straddles the highwire cutting between those two opposing forces is what makes this promising debut most fascinatingly restless.
It's present day, and when 'Our Hero, Balthazar' begins, Balthy is weeping into his iPhone camera. 'This loneliness is killing me,' he says. But it's all fakery, as staged as the active-shooter drills at Balthy's private Manhattan school, crocodile tears welled up to weaponize his narcissism against the bleeding hearts of passive, smash-the-freaking-like-button social media sheep. Balthy is barely attended to by his single mom, Nicole (Ehle), who's so distracted by a romance with a rising politico (David M. Raine) that she goes out of town with the guy on Balthy's birthday weekend. Meanwhile, Balthy's nonexistent father just cuts the checks while remaining upstate in Westchester.
Balthy appears to have no social life outside the internet-only interactions inside his high-rise bedroom overlooking the city. He's attracted to an activist classmate (Pippa Knowles), who sounds off on the 'monetization of narcissism' after one of those school-shooting drills, but he alienates her entirely after trying to make out with her while watching dark-web-dispatched closed-circuit footage of an actual Arkansas school massacre. (As in last year's 'Red Rooms,' about a woman perversely drawn to snuff films, Boyson keeps the carnage off-camera, letting the sounds of guns popping and screams overheard ooze into our imagination.)
Balthy's preoccupation with school shootings entwines him over Instagram exchanges with Texas-dwelling convenience store worker Solomon, played by an unrecognizable Butterfield in brassy bleach-blond hair in desperate need of a rinse of purple shampoo. Solomon is lonely, too, ignored by his father, a Frank Mackey-type motivational speaker who used to be an amateur porn star and now peddles a powdery testosterone supplement called Thrush. The angsty teen, who's got far too much access to firearms and fantasizes about blowing up his peers, lives with his ailing, Franzia-wine-box-guzzling grandmother (Becky Ann Baker, hilarious and sweatily confined to an easy chair). He's loathed by (and perhaps in love with) his coworker, played by a crassly funny Anna Baryshnikov who again trashily steals the scene as she did in 'Love Lies Bleeding,' there as a lesbian stalker with gingivitis.
So Balthy, using all the AI chicanery disturbingly at his disposal, poses as a nympho online female sex bot to lure Solomon's attention via DMs and to eventually meet up with him in a sad pocket of rural Texas. Balthy goads Solomon's forming Oedipal desire to murder his father, while cautioning as Solomon suits up for the kill, 'It's not even a school — nobody's gonna care.' Balthy, meanwhile, hopes that in stopping Solomon's parallel planned school shooting he can somehow win back the affections of Eleanor (Knowles), who begs Balthy to stop reaching out but seemingly hasn't learned how to block a caller.
Is Balthy a hero? Is Solomon a murderer? Or are they both just hopeless casualties of an epidemic of over-interneted incel-adjacents who've turned being online at all these days into a pervasive existential risk? Car 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 news, where the last tragedy is the latest news item.
Though hardly transgressive if you've kept up with the recent crop of indies that blend New York-at-night thriller with Gen Z-skewering social messaging (Olmo Schnabel's queer Manhattan caper 'Pet Shop Boys' from last year comes to mind), the contradictions in the thrilling pleasures of this film's craft alongside its darkly comic warning letter about gun culture make for a potent if ultimately ambivalent first venture. But it's ambivalence by design, as Boyson ends his movie on a painfully inevitable, macabrely funny finale that brings the whole thing full circle, Balthy once again crying on his own command for all the world (or at least a handful of followers and news watchers) to see.
Martell makes a strong dramatic impression as a seriously fucked-up kid, but is he more fucked-up than any kid — or any of us — is lately? It's Butterfield's pathos and toxic teendom that give 'Our Hero, Balthazar' its emotional anchor, if the film has one at all. Boyson seems more enamored with the pyrotechnics of filmmaking — and as a first-time feature director, why wouldn't he be? — than with sticking to an emotional landing. 'Our Hero, Balthazar' isn't cold by any means, but the result comes off as more ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the approach would suggest.
'Our Hero, Balthazar' premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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