Our Hero, Balthazar review – perceptive dark comedy

With social media morphing into a domineering beast over the years, young people are increasingly using it as something to hide behind, or worse, to exhibit a personality that is in no way aligned with their true feelings and values. This couldn’t be more true in the case of Balthazar (Jaeden Martell), a wealthy New York City teen who, night in, night out, basks in the sterile glow of his ring-light tripod. The moment the record button is pressed, he coaxes feigned tears and recites recycled words that ring hollow.

Amid a distinctly American school-shooter drill, he becomes enamoured of budding gun-reform advocate Eleanor (Pippa Knowles) and adjusts his content-making strategy to suit her ardour and sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, it is not her attention that this positioning attracts. Instead, a dialogue ensues with a mysterious user who claims to be planning a school shooting. Convinced intervening will earn him hero status and the admiration of his crush, Balthazar hatches a catfishing scheme that finds him bound for Fort Worth, Texas.

On the other side of the digital exchange is Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a young man who personifies the fringes of America. Caught in a desperate pursuit of connection, he strikes an agreement with his deadbeat father to become a salesman for his bogus alpha-male supplements brand. Their sour rapport reveals a less guarded register beneath his incel-coded online presence, exposing an almost childlike yearning not merely to be seen, but to be wanted too.

As luck would have it, Balthazar’s surprise arrival proves to be the makeshift answer to his prayers. To the privileged teen, Solomon’s trailer-park lifestyle feels like an entry into a kind of uncharted fantasy realm. Social dramas often walk a fine line between realism and imitation, and this debut feature from ex-Safdie brothers producer Oscar Boyson succeeds emphatically in regulating raw immediacy with perceptive dark comedy, under the logic that if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. The tightly constructed and progressively tense script unfolds like a tale of two cities, probing the pressing parallels and divergences of contemporary youth.

The bait-and-switch between the script’s empathetic and scathing gaze allows ample space for the film’s cast to flourish, especially Butterfield, who is notably away from home turf here, delivering a transformative and profoundly complex performance following a string of more subdued roles. Balthazar and Solomon’s intertwined mythos settles into the sense that they are merely different threads in the same warped tapestry, leaving two enduring truths in its wake: fortune favours the rich and the kids are absolutely not all right.