What do a Texas trailer park incel and a Manhattan penthouse-dwelling influencer have in common? They both just want friends.
Our Hero, Balthazar proves that the distance between these two kinds is thinner than we’d like to admit. Though they exist on opposite ends of the socioeconomic and ideological spectrum, they’re both modern symbols of the same thing: a generation of youth mistaking alienation for identity.
In Oscar Boyson’s feature debut, Balthazar/Balthy (Jaeden Martell) spends his time posting videos of himself crying over injustices with a soft ring light glow. Two thousand miles southwest of his ivory tower, Solomon/Solly (Asa Butterfield) rots in anonymity; no one to anyone, including his pyramid-scheming father.
The radical and the romantic are born from the same hunger for connection, the same digital loneliness dressed in different clothes. One in Supreme, the other in Hot Topic. But Solomon and Balthazar aren’t opposites; they’re echoes. Two boys trying to prove they exist through attention. Our Hero, Balthazar observes our cultural decay, diagnoses it, and traces the shared pathology of a generation.
Virtue has become a kind of social currency; the more you spend it, the richer you look. Ari Aster’s Eddington gave us a prototype with the character Brian, who hops on the BLM bandwagon to impress a girl. Similarly, Balthazar isn’t compassionate; he’s competitive. He doesn’t care to make a difference, but he wants to be seen making one. When his classmate Eleanor starts protesting against the normalization of active shooter drills, Balthazar finds himself his next opportunity for moral branding.
His ‘activism’ functions like the multilevel marketing of a high T supplement—strategically emotional, designed to accrue attention and influence. Balthy embodies the modern man’s rebrand into the post-woke male who treats decency like a sneaker drop. Society doesn’t ask men to change anymore, only to appear like they’ve tried. At moments, the Kyle Rittenhouse of it all rears its ugly head—righteousness giving way to the spectacle of violence, boyhood and brutality mistaken for heroism. The film shows what happens when that strategy is tested: when Balthazar’s virtue is nothing more than a curated performance, collapse is inevitable.
Where Balthazar is desperate to be seen as good, Solomon has given up on being seen at all. He’s the disenfranchised outsider rendered in final form as a 4chan lurker. He’s angry, alienated, but comically self-serious. Boyson doesn’t treat him as a monster so much as a parody of one, the kind of guy who works on his manifesto draft between goon sessions with his anime body pillow. Solomon’s nihilism is so outsized it loops back to being pathetic, and by default, funny. There’s a quick moment in the film where Solomon shows Balthazar the stash under his bed: an arsenal of serial-number-free guns, some Nazi paraphernalia, and a rainbow Pride flag. “I’ve had a lot of phases,” he shrugs. It’s probably a throwaway line, but it says so much. It shows how Solomon is less radicalized than he is restless to fit in, testing out ideologies like outfits.
Solomon’s feels familiar. I know this guy, we’re on the same discord server. You’ve probably seen this guy too, maybe behind the counter at your local gas station, maybe in the mirror on a bad day. His isolation isn’t exceptional, it’s cultural.
What makes him an interesting character is how the movie refuses to turn his anger into a lesson in morality. Instead, Solomon becomes a bounce-board to Balthazar’s performative empathy. A reminder that both men are products of the same void. One tries to be loved for his goodness; the other wants to be feared for his pain. But Boyson also carefully treads that line, he isn’t sympathizing with Solomon, he’s mocking the self-mythology of the “misunderstood guy,” the sort of post-ironic loner.
Once the two boys start hanging out, Our Hero, Balthazar becomes a case study in male transference. What starts as Balthazar’s mission to “save” Solomon from becoming a school shooter— or more accurately, to be seen saving him—slips into something murkier. The duo’s best scenes hum with the same homoerotic tension as Elephant: that psychosexual charge of one boy teaching another how to hold an AR-15, their fingers brushing on the trigger guard. At other moments, the thrill of finding someone as disillusioned as yourself echoes of The Dirties, where one always ends up more vengeful than the other.
Balthazar sees in Solomon the rawness he’s lost; Solomon sees in Balthazar the validation he’s never had. Their bond curdles into a mutual projection where suddenly they both just want to be the other. It’s almost romantic, in that way men’s self-destruction often is. Their story goes beyond the fate that brings them together, it shows them trading places while neither notice. The altruist becomes the executioner, the outcast becomes the conscience.
Our Hero, Balthazar exposes a continuum: disenfranchisement and disaffectedness are not opposites, but reflections of the same cultural black hole. Boyson understands that, really, it’s not political. It’s theatre. It’s a modern tragedy. His direction is to puppeteer these two archetypes with the same morbid curiosity we all have, letting their absurdities play out without flinching. As the movie says, it’s all a big grift. Every character in this film is a grifter. Everyone is performing, hustling. From politicians, to life coaches, to salesmen, to Balthy and Solly grifting for attention. Scamming and calculating for a sense of identity. Our Hero, Balthazar is one of few truly contemporary films that lets the cons unfold in plain sight, exposing both the grifters and our complicit culture that buys in.