Tribeca 2025 Review: OUR HERO, BALTHAZAR, Fear and Loathing on the Net and IRL

As the movie opens, the titular Balthazar (Jaeden Martell in one of his best roles to date), or Balthy as he prefers to be referred to, performs a bit in front of his phone camera where he cries and complains about the state of the world.

As we soon find out, Balthy does that a lot. A ridiculously wealthy teenager who lives in a penthouse and has a personal “life coach”, he likes to feel like “a part of a community”, as he himself puts it, and crying on camera is his one unfailing skill.

At a special presentation on school shootings, Balthy hears his classmate, Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), talk passionately about gun control. He immediately develops a crush and performs his usual shtick, recording one of his tearful videos on the matter.

Thus, he inadvertently gains the attention of an anonymous user from Texas who mocks him, sends him a video of a recent shooting, and claims to be a mass shooter himself. When Balthy’s initial attempts to impress Eleanor in one of the most disturbing and darkly funny seduction scenes ever fail, the boy heads to Texas to either befriend the presumed shooter or stop him. Or both. Or neither.

In an ideal world, Our Hero, Balthazar, a debut feature film of Oscar Boyson (producer of Good Time and Uncut Gems), would have been a movie everyone would be talking about relentlessly after its premiere. Some viewers might be offended, which the authors are aware of and seem to be okay with, as long as it at least keeps the conversation about gun control going. The fans of the movie would also include more than just a bunch of film critics who watched it at a festival, enjoyed it, and admired it. As it is, one can only hope that Oscar Boyson’s debut will find a significantly wider audience soon.

When it does, the viewers are in for an unexpected piece that sets up its unique tone from the scene in which two teenagers have a meet-cute in the middle of a school shooting simulation. Like that previously mentioned awkward seduction attempt, the movie’s intonation can be both disturbing and devilishly hilarious. And just like the film itself, its titular protagonist is full of contradictions too. Even the title is ironic: not only is it a play on the name of Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic, Au hasard Balthazar, but also a huge wink at the fact that Balthy is indeed a hero of our times – a tragic, deeply flawed figure who is all about seeming and not being, lost in social media constructs and toxic concepts about masculinity.

While Martell’s character has limitless options and opportunities, and no agenda to utilize them for, the other protagonist of Boyson’s film is the presumed potential shooter from Texas. A young man ironically named Solomon (a very unexpected Asa Butterfield), he suffers from the same misconceptions and anxieties, but exists in an absolutely different reality. Living with his grandmother (Becky Ann Baker), Solomon tries to trade his dead-end job at the store by following his scammer father’s example and selling supplements, but lacks the necessary panache.

As the Internet becomes the initial place for these two lonely, anxiety-ridden souls to have their own “meet-cute”, Our Hero, Balthazar takes an effective swing at contemporary social media culture. The film has lots of macabre fun, picking at how little the online world has to do with actual reality. But then it goes further, digging deeper into the way virtual reality affects the physical one, making the “IRL” fragile and elusive – the idea supported by the camera work of Christopher Messina (If I Had Legs I'd Kick You), with dizzying, disorienting shots that grow frantic towards the end.

In any other movie, there could be a story about these two guys discovering a true connection, no matter how bizarre; in fact, finding Balthy to be weirder than himself is a big selling point for Solomon. Both guys do strive for something that could be real, experiencing glimpses of kindredness and a tangible undercurrent of erotic tension (especially when guns are involved), but the film grows progressively darker, foreshadowing an outcome that is inevitably tragic.

Nothing is profound or genuine by default IRL, unless we allow ourselves to be just that. But just as the film's dainty final bit suggests, it's always more comfortable to go for a punchline instead. 

The film enjoyed its world premiere at Tribeca Festival 2025. Visit its official page for more information.