Final Rating: 4/5
Our Hero Balthazar, the feature debut of writer-director Oscar Boyson, is a pitch-black Gen Z satire about finding belonging in an increasingly violent and disconnected world.
The feature debut of writer-director Oscar Boyson, Our Hero stars Jaeden Martell as Balthazar, an affluent New York teen who spends his days fake crying in Instagram reels in pursuit of gaining internet fame. Upon learning a classmate, Eleanor (Pippa Knowles) is passionate about gun laws, he starts obsessing over school shootings in an attempt to gain her affection.
When an internet troll named Solomon (Asa Butterfield) threatens to commit a school shooting, Balthazar sees this as a golden opportunity to win over Eleanor, and flies to Texas to befriend Solomon and stop him from carrying it out.
At the core of Our Hero is the unlikely friendship between Balthazar and Solomon. The two are mirror images of each other: both have a strained-at-best relationship with their absent fathers; both have unrequited crushes; both spend too much time on Instagram trying to get noticed. Most importantly, both Balthazar and Solomon feel obligated to put on a performance for each other, rather than simply being themselves.
To onlookers, Balthazar presents as a gentle soul trying to calm Solomon, an edgy, wannabe-murderer. In reality, the dynamic is closer to the opposite: Solomon is a more empathetic character, spending most of his time worrying about making rent so he and his grandma aren’t forced to move from their trailer park, while Balthazar callously sees his time in Texas as little more than a weird vacation.
Actors Martell and Butterfield have fantastic chemistry, selling the transactional nature of the boys’ relationship while dropping in real bonding moments. An early scene where Solomon teaches Balthazar to shoot a rifle reads as genuinely sweet, while also revealing something pretty dark as Balthazar takes a little too much joy in firing off rifle rounds.
Another highlight of the film features Balthazar and Solomon just hanging out at a burger joint watching porn together (Solomon’s father was a porn star). The two are fast friends, seemingly each other’s only real friend, which makes it all the more tragic that that friendship is introduced with a time limit.
Martell as Balthazar is introduced in the modern equivalent of an ivory tower: an absurdly high New York penthouse. His room is massive, but most prominently features a tripod and lighting setup he uses to record himself crying into a phone, followed by a few minutes of frantically refreshing Instagram in hopes of getting a couple of likes.
Balthazar’s performativeness doesn’t quite feel malicious, but rather a consequence of just not knowing anything else. To him, money, emotion, even relationships are tools that can be acquired as needed and expended without a second thought. One cruel line in the movie comes right after Solomon’s grandma tells Balthazar that the rent is going up, so they may have to move. “That’ll be nice,” he says flatly, “maybe you can get a real home.”
Solomon, meanwhile, lives a lonely life built around caring for his grandma, trying to hold down a gas station attendant job, and desperately attempting to connect with his deadbeat father, Beaver Jackson (Chris Bauer). Solomon fumbles each of these relationships, largely through his own self-destructive nature. Unlike Balthazar, Solomon has a harder time performing for the people around him. At best, his attempts to connect with people amount to rambling about cartoons to uninterested parties like his grandma and dad. At worst, Solomon is a harasser, at one point blowing up at a female coworker for not agreeing to go to a concert with him.
The logline of Our Hero promises a film about school shootings, but the actual film is much more about loneliness and isolation in a world that’s increasingly violent, increasingly connected, and increasingly detached. Solomon and Balthazar find connection through social media, but those connections are hollow.
The two bond over an interest – more or less – in school shootings, a serious problem affecting their generation and people around them, that nevertheless feels distant enough that neither takes it seriously. Even when the two are inevitably forced into a serious situation, their brushes with a violent world are turned around to become more content, more fodder for hollow connections with anonymous people.
Our Hero Balthazar is ultimately a tragic film about growing up in America in 2025. As written, Boyson’s film presents a bleak worldview. And while the seriousness of the story certainly comes through, it’s also a raucously funny satire anchored by two great leads.
