Some films turn a lens on society, breaking it down and ultimately arriving at some sort of solution. Other films are more nihilistic. They peel back the layers of culture and find nothing redeeming underneath. Our Hero, Balthazar is the latter.
We follow two boys on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum: Jaeden Martell as Balthazar “Balthy” and Asa Butterfield as Solomon. Balthazar is a wealthy NYC teenager being shepherded to his private school by a private driver.
The best descriptor for him is disaffected. He seems to yearn for human connection, with the root of his actions stemming from a crush on his classmate Eleanor, played by Pippa Knowles.
Solomon is a much more sympathetic character. He’s destitute in rural Texas. His mother has died from an apparent drug overdose. He lives with his grandmother (Becky Ann Baker), who is only ever seen with a box of Franzia within arm’s reach.
His dad, Beaver (Chris Bauer), sees him as nothing more than another sale for his ultra-masculine supplement pyramid scheme.
Balthazar is fascinated by school shootings, spurred on by an anachronistically hilarious drill put on by an organization called “Act On,” in which the school... performs a mock school shooting to better prepare for the possibility of a real one. This whole scene draws parallels to the millennial version of this kind of preventative programming—DARE—and seems destined for a similar fate of complete ineffectiveness.
Balthy spends his nights imitating emotion and posting cringe social media videos of himself crying about gun violence. It perfectly captures the inauthenticity inherent in our social media culture, summed up in one deplorable action. He begins DMing with an alleged school shooter and, through a series of slightly unbelievable actions—including catfishing and sexting using AI-generated audio of his mom’s voice—Balthazar shows up in Texas to meet Solomon and stop a possible school shooting.
What we find instead is mostly a sad, depressed young man in Solomon, who has the means to pull off a school shooting and has even thought about it, but doesn’t really appear to be motivated to go through with it. This is a lonely kid dealt a terrible hand. He has no one and struggles to make connections. It even feels like he only really entertains the idea of a school shooting to impress Balthazar, who has made it pretty clear that’s the reason he came.
The film proceeds as tragically as one might expect. And while it is defined as a “black comedy,” I was hard-pressed to find anything even darkly comedic. This directorial debut from Oscar Boyson is confident and accompanied by excellent performances, especially from Asa Butterfield, playing very differently from anything we’ve seen from him before.
The third act has lows followed by even lower lows, and the script, though a touch sloppy at times, ends on a profoundly haunting image of Balthazar, now past the events of the film, being propped up for bigger and better things in a world that seems keen to reward what it wants to see rather than what is actually there. This film feels plucked right out of Eddington, with Ari Aster and Oscar Boyson sharing a similarly hopeless vision of America.