Oscar Boyson and fellow writer Ricky Camilleri have crafted an unsettling, darkly comic, and urgent exploration of our social media age in Our Hero, Balthazar. This is a movie unafraid to tackle head-on themes of isolation, identity, gun culture, performative behaviour, and the ever-growing divide that paints some as heroes and others as villains based purely on wealth and class.
You can hardly go a day without news coverage of the negative effects of doomscrolling, reels, likes, instant video and live blogging on our kids. These news reports often focus on the growing campaign to restrict, ban, or age-control social media sites, preventing kids from using them. Yet many parents continue to buy their kids smartphones at a young age and regularly use YouTube and TikTok as babysitters, in a world where their kids’ behaviours and actions are everyone else’s responsibility, not theirs.
The social media world we now label as damaging is one we have all created and freely allowed companies to profit from. As social media grew, so did the pocket worlds it encouraged, worlds where people could pretend to be anything they wanted for attention and likes. At the same time, influencers, many with little talent beyond their own narcissism and need for attention, became celebrities, and ideology became the new journalism. These online worlds have created people like Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and Solomon (Asa Butterfield), two young men from different sides of the tracks, linked by a toxic online culture, in Oscar Boyson’s stunning, unnerving, and audacious feature directorial debut, Our Hero, Balthazar.
Film has long shone a light on some of the most uncomfortable truths in our world, yet in recent years, films have themselves become victims of the polarised, popularity-driven social media landscape surrounding them. Premieres and press screenings are now full of online influencers who will say lovely things about a movie, as long as studios shower them with gifts and invitations that feed their need for attention. At the same time, many filmmakers have become afraid of upsetting people, as they attempt to walk the narrow line between ever more polarised opinions, and film festivals have found themselves criticised by campaigners, groups and political movements for being both too political and not political enough.
Thankfully, there are still filmmakers out there determined to challenge and champion risk-taking in film, despite our ever-more polarised world. In the same vein as Larry Clark’s Bully (2001), Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), and Todd Wiseman Jr.’s The School Duel (2025), Boyson and fellow writer Ricky Camilleri’s Our Hero, Balthazar, shines a light on topics that many people will undoubtedly find uncomfortable through a darkly comic, tragic, breathless and visceral story of two lost, lonely and damaged boys.
Balthazar (Martell) has everything a boy could dream of: wealth, privilege, a Manhattan address, and a mother (Jennifer Ehle) who gives him everything he wants as she busily lives her own life. But for all his privilege, there is one thing Balthazar lacks: a personality, identity, and individuality. Balthazar is a nobody, a hollow soul with little that attracts anyone into his orbit, let alone encourages them to stay there. He pops Xanax like Skittles, and for all his privilege, is nothing but a lost and alienated kid searching for connection. Therefore, he has turned to social media, where he uploads videos of himself crying about the state of the world and sobbing about injustices he cares little about. These videos aren’t genuine; like Balthazar himself, they are performative, hollow and void of any meaning, but they also make him popular, at least online.
As his private high school conducts training exercises on how to deal with a school shooter, Balthazar connects with a girl who is everything he isn’t: Eleanor (Pippa Knowles) is passionate, edgy, and anything but fake. She intrigues Balthazar, so he plans to stage a new online stunt to earn her affection in the only way he knows how. Eleanor is passionate about gun control, and a recent school shooting in Arkansas City offers Balthazar the perfect opportunity to hone his performative talents.
As he stages another crying video, this time centred around the school shooting, a comment sparks his attention. The anonymous, Deathdealer_16, claims to be a school shooter who is planning an attack, and Balthazar sees an opportunity to prevent the crime, win more followers and capture Eleanor’s heart, even though she already thinks he is a freak and wants nothing to do with him. Balthazar enters into an online conversation with Deathdealer_16, otherwise known as Solomon (Butterfield). However, when Solomon fails to engage with him, Balthazar, intent on his plan, pretends to be a girl, luring the lost and lonely Solomon with promises of sex, before heading to Texas to meet him.
Solomon expects to meet a girl, not a fellow lost boy, but Balthazar has a plan, and it’s not long before Solomon has taken Balthazar under his wing. What follows is 24 hours spent in the company of two tormented and lost boys, one a wealthy, disconnected boy who holds no empathy and seeks popularity and the other a working-class young man who lives with his grandmother, and is desperate for the love and respect of a toxic father who long ago ditched him.
These two young men are two sides of the same coin, yet also highlight the extremes of wealth inequality that now divide us. ‘Balthy’ certainly isn’t a hero, and Solomon isn’t a cold-blooded killer in the making. They are both young men lost in a maze of masculinity, where the internet has become their father figure and guide to what it means to be a man. Women have rejected both boys, and both are awkward and uncertain of their place outside the online worlds they have created, one performative in nature and the other rooted in survivalism.
At the heart of this warped buddy movie about loneliness, guns, extremism, manipulation, and class divide are the truly exceptional performances of Jaeden Martell and Asa Butterfield. Martell is cold and calculating in a way only wealth can provide, as Balthazar plays his game, knowing he has a get-out-of-jail-free card because of his background. In contrast, Butterfield’s Solomon carries a vulnerability and anger not present in Balthazar, as he sits on the periphery of incel culture, his identity built over years of loneliness, rejected by his peers and the father he is so desperate to please. Solomon views Balthazar as a friend, a companion, and even a brother within minutes of meeting him, not because of any special bond, but because he finally feels he isn’t alone.
Balthazar and Solomon may be from different sides of the tracks, but they are united by a willingness to assimilate into any ideological group that offers notoriety and a sense of belonging. Both boys are desperate to be noticed, but in reality, only one has the privilege on his side to make that a reality without being viewed by society as a villain.
The fact that a film this powerful and on-the-nose in its exploration of masculinity, class divide, gun culture and social media was sidelined by several major film festivals over concerns about its themes is deeply worrying. If films like Our Hero, Balthazar are rejected for their content by festivals that once championed movies like Mysterious Skin and Bully, then cinema’s ability to hold a mirror to society is not only greatly diminished, but one must question the future of filmmaking itself as an art form that openly challenges our society.
Boyson and Camilleri have crafted an unsettling, darkly comic, and urgent exploration of our social media age in Our Hero, Balthazar. This is a movie unafraid to tackle head-on themes of isolation, identity, gun culture, performative behaviour, and the ever-growing divide that paints some as heroes and others as villains based purely on wealth and class.
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