Oscar Boyson’s new film follows two alienated teenagers caught between violence, validation and life online. Then its protagonist escaped the screen, and became an Instagram personality with a cult following of his own
Peering into a ring light as the New York City skyline shimmers outside, Balthazar Malone’s crocodile tears are an unsettling sign of what’s to come in Oscar Boyson’s new indie film, Our Hero, Balthazar. “Are you alone, too?” he asks his audience – a nod to a generation for whom loneliness and life online have become increasingly intertwined. The tears stop the second the recording does.
Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) is a Manhattan private-school teenager who believes he can win a girl’s attention by preventing what he thinks might be a school shooting. His plan is to befriend the would-be shooter, Solomon (Asa Butterfield). It’s an absurd and unsettling conceit: Balthazar wants to do something heroic, but his motivations are rooted less in altruism than in his own desire for attention and validation. What follows is 96 minutes of dark and occasionally comic commentary on an all-American trifecta: incel culture, school shootings and teen alienation.
It’s a disquieting film centred on characters who, however misguided, seem to want nothing more than to belong somewhere. But since landing in cinemas earlier this year, Our Hero, Balthazar has taken on a strange second life – one that extends the film’s preoccupation with performed identity beyond the screen. Balthazar, it turns out, exists IRL – or at least on social media.
Before Our Hero, Balthazar hit US cinemas, Boyson created an Instagram account for his film’s protagonist and, with 116,000 followers at the time of writing, it’s safe to say that @bboymalone212 has effectively broken the fourth wall. Balthazar’s Instagram profile is less a conventional piece of film marketing than a real-life incarnation of the character, replete with more crocodile tears: the self-described “feminist” promotes his “biopic” amid TMZ articles and reels that ooze sociopathy.
For a film concerned with the ways teenagers construct themselves online, turning Balthazar into an actual influencer stretches Our Hero, Balthazar’s narrative into a clever new realm – one that has proved surprisingly effective at drawing audiences in. “I met a college grad at an Atlanta screening who had driven a few hours from Alabama with his friend, and bought them both tickets as his grad present,” Peter Gold of WG Pictures, which co-distributed the film in the US, tells AnOther. “They were propelled by the @bboymalone212 account – they just had to see it. It’s definitely driven theatrical attendance.”
One of the biggest social media moments for Balthazar was his in-character house tour with real-life content creator Caleb Simpson in March – as the film hit US screens – further confusing the distinction between fiction and reality. A quick scroll through the video’s comments makes it hard to tell how many users believed Balthazar was real, but the stunt appears to have landed. “I like this new way to promote movies,” one comment reads. This kind of boundary-blurring hints at how social media could offer indie films with standout characters like Balthazar a new way to reach audiences. How far that online momentum will carry beyond the film’s US theatrical run is less clear, however; Our Hero, Balthazar opened in UK cinemas in July with comparatively little fanfare.
Boyson – a director, writer and producer, whose production credits include the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time and Uncut Gems – didn’t expect the film to garner such “hardcore” fans. “We’re talking about people who saw it five, six, even 10 times in the cinema,” he tells AnOther. But the film’s appeal lies beyond its unusual strategy. For viewers of Balthazar’s generation, the director argues, contemporary teenage life is increasingly absent from the big screen.
“When I was a 17 year old like Balthazar, it felt like there was a new movie every weekend about characters my age. Today, that’s not the case,” he tells us. “So I think that’s one reason: representation – even if Balthazar is the guy you laugh at or are terrified by and not the guy that you want to be. Most young people assume Hollywood doesn’t give a fuck about them. They look at the movie theatre like, ‘What does that have to do with me?’ And they’re right. So when a movie like Our Hero, Balthazar comes along, suddenly they feel like their generation is seen and represented and that alone is enough to spark interest.”
For Boyson, it was also important to make a film that acknowledged the role screens play in our lives. “The movie isn’t about screens,” he explains, “it’s about the boys who are looking at the screens.” Those boys initially appear to occupy very different worlds. On the other side of the coin from Balthazar’s skewed longing for validation is Solomon’s equally tangled sense of self, framed less by a defining anger, perhaps, than a complex sadness. When Balthazar sets out to meet the person he believes is planning a school shooting, the encounter brings the film’s jarring dynamics into focus. Cue strange catfishing, an awkward meeting, some gun-toting and an unsettling degree of uncertainty about how this will all play out.
Neither Balthazar nor Solomon is particularly easy to sympathise with. But as the film progresses, their relationship begins to expose something interesting: the ways people try on identities, particularly online, until the performance threatens to become real. Boyson was thinking about this from the film’s inception, and Balthazar’s own Instagram presence now brings that theme into the real world, making Our Hero, Balthazar feel peculiarly of its moment.
“We started writing in 2022, when the pandemic was still very fresh,” says the director. “I felt for the kids who were forced to spend those formative teenage years – where you’re trying to figure out who you are and what feels authentic to you – inside, alone and online, where everything is performed.”
Later, he concludes, “Making a movie where one boy is flirting with the identity of a public victim and another boy with that of a mass shooter felt like a new way to explore the struggles and feelings many of us experience at that age, feelings which are pretty universal.”
Our Hero, Balthazar is out now.