Our Hero, Balthazar (2026 Manchester Film Festival)
If ever there was a movie for our time, it is Our Hero, Balthazar. The film, directed by longtime Safdie Brothers collaborator Oscar Boyson, takes a look at the spectrum of the male loneliness epidemic and revels in the toxicity of social media, gun culture and right-wing grifting.
We follow Balthazar (Jaeden Martell, Knives Out), a spoiled New York City rich kid and his social media-addled brain. Balthazar, nicknamed Balthy by his permanently absent mother and his preppy, wide-smiled life coach (Noah Centineo), is a product of the new era of the digital age. He’s a kid who has grown up on the internet without limitations, guidelines or restrictions, numb to America’s assembly line of school shootings and injustice delivered tidily through his phone via minute-long TikTok takes. His only means of understanding the world is to perform and pander to an audience. He records reaction videos to the world’s latest tragedies, in which he can turn the waterworks on and off with disturbing practicality.
Balthy takes his performance activism to new heights while trying to win the affections of his classmate Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), who calls Balthy a ‘fucking psycho’ when she realises how detached he is from real human emotion. On a persistent mission to convince Eleanor he can make a real difference, Balthy catfishes an internet troll claiming to be a school shooter and collides with a man on the opposite end of the male loneliness spectrum, Solomon (Asa Butterfield, Sex Education). Solomon lives in a trailer with his ailing grandmother. He can’t make rent, lives in a bedroom full of guns and is the unwanted son of a right-wing, pyramid-scheme-peddling father he desperately wants to impress.
Balthy travels to Texas, hoping to improve Solomon’s life through offering him friendship, thus becoming the kind of hero Eleanor might want to date. The two form a worrying, line-blurring form of friendship. We follow them through the course of a few days as they play around with guns and drugs, each unconscious of the concerning, problematic and reckless behaviours they exhibit.
Our Hero, Balthazar, is a sharp-witted and darkly comical look at life for young people in America. Much like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, it refuses to make its characters digestible, revealing the nihilistic principles of the world of social media, where so much meaning is assigned to everything that everything has become meaningless. As long as you can achieve a goal, garner attention or assimilate to the right agenda, anything goes, and nothing matters. Both Balthazar and Solomon are numb to the moral significance of their behaviours. During one scene, where Solomon is telling Balthazar about his interests and hobbies, he lays out a pride flag next to a swastika patch, claiming he’s ‘had a lot of phases’. The opposing symbols reveal a lost boy, removed from responsibility through a phone screen, looking for a tribe, willing to stand for anything, even extreme fascist beliefs, just to feel like he belongs to something.
Although he lives a life far removed from the one Solomon lives, Balthazar, too, is completely detached from the moral significance of his actions. Alongside fake crying for views online, he pursues Eleanour despite her insistence that he leave her alone, threatens to accuse his life coach of rape to get his own way, and records his mother’s voice so he can use AI to generate pornographic voice notes to lure in Solomon. Nothing seems off-limits to Balthzar; he’s a child of disinterest with the money to do anything he wants.
Yet, despite its countless depictions of deeply disturbing and transgressive behaviour, the film comes closer than anything else to tapping into the raging and immensely popular incel culture taking over the lives of many young men. Earlier this year, Louis Theroux released his newest documentary, Inside the Manosphere, in which he attempted to understand the men spearheading the manosphere movement and their hostile attitudes towards women. Theroux exposed the men in this documentary, revealing them to be conmen with empty beliefs designed to make them money. However, Theroux somewhat overlooked what’s happening in young men’s lives that makes them feel empowered by or drawn in by incel, edgelord, and red-pilled culture.
While Our Hero, Balthazar, doesn’t claim to have any answers and doesn’t attempt to make any grand sweeping statement, it does reveal something concerning about the lives of boys existing within the new wave of internet culture and why they might align themselves with extreme beliefs and behaviours. Balthazar and Solomon don’t believe in anything. They’re so isolated and removed from reality and so seeped in loneliness that they’re performing their lives, hoping it will bring them approval, attention, money, friends, girls or a reaction from an audience that might make them feel like they belong to something bigger. The fruitlessness of their friendship film brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘if you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything’.
It’s helped out by some really interesting performances. Jennifer Ehle (Saint Maud) as Balthy’s absent out-for-herself mother, and Chris Bauer as Solomon’s soulless father, add even more nuance into the mix. Jaeden Martell feels all grown up, finally free from the restraints of schoolboy roles. Asa Butterfield, sporting a box-dye bleach job and a twangy Texas drawl, is almost unrecognisable and delivers a transfixing performance. The film isn’t an easy watch, but in not shying away from uncomfortable subjects, it feels like an eye-opening, sharp shove forward.
★★★★
Screened at the 2026 Manchester Film Festival. Release date TBC / Asa Butterfield, Jaeden Martell, Noah Centinio, Jennifer Ehle, Chris Bauer, Anna Baryshnikov, Avan Jogia/ Dir: Oscar Boyson / Picturehouse / TBC
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