‘Our Hero, Balthazar’ review: Effective and unsettling

Oscar Boyson’s Our Hero, Balthazar pulls no punches in its analysis of school shootings, social media, and the manosphere.

Oscar Boyson is probably one of the most interesting YouTube-to-Hollywood success stories, having segued from a producer on Casey Neistat’s YouTube channel to producing Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, and then launching a series of indie darlings, including Good Time, Mistress America, Heaven Knows What, and Funny Pages. Despite his strength as a producer, Boyson has never actually written or directed anything other than shorts. Until now, that is. Not content to do anything small, his feature debut Our Hero, Balthazar focuses on one of America’s heaviest topics.

Jaeden Martell stars as the titular Balthazar, a teen with a NYC penthouse and a private school education. His mother (Jennifer Ehle) is too busy schmoozing the New York elite to pay him any attention. His classmates are as vain as he is, and everyone else he interacts with works for him. Faced with a lack of actual relationships, he spends his free time fake-crying on video for social media clout. When he meets scholarship student Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), he’s intrigued by her lack of wealth and actual concern for social issues. He pretends to care about school shootings to grow closer to her. However, she immediately clocks his inauthenticity and rejects him.

Enter Solomon (an unrecognizable Asa Butterfield), who sees Balthazar’s crying videos and messages him, claiming to be planning a school shooting. To Solomon, this is a bit of internet trolling. To Balthazar, this is an opportunity to win over Eleanor. He flies down to Texas to meet and befriend Solomon so Solomon won’t go through with the shooting. Balthazar finds Solomon living in poverty, struggling to support his grandmother (Becky Ann Baker), and desperately trying to connect with the absentee father (Chris Bauer), who neglects him in favor of a scam testosterone supplement empire. As the duo forms an uneasy camaraderie, the question of how far each will go to please the other begins to veer into potentially lethal territory.

Boyson largely avoids the grotesque violence of similar films.

It wouldn’t be fair to review this film without mentioning that I have been personally impacted by school shootings. Or that as a film festival programmer I tend to watch multiple films about school shootings each year. But Boyson approaches the topic in a way that is largely unique. Yes, this is a film about school shootings. But it lives in the space around these shootings rather than the shootings themselves. Our Hero, Balthazar doesn’t attempt to traumatize its audience through displays of violence like much of its ilk. Instead, it focuses on the kind of society that allows things like this to keep happening.

There’s never really any question as to how Balthazar and Solomon ended up the way they are. The film balances calling out despicable behavior with acknowledging that these boys only ever ended up this way because the people around them failed them. It’s exceptionally nuanced, and the fact that Boyson succeeds in inspiring so much sympathy for extremely unsympathetic people is remarkable. But no amount of writing or directing could make this work without Asa Butterfield’s performance. Our Hero, Balthazar is almost certainly destined to garner less attention than Butterfield’s more mainstream fare but this is almost certainly the actor’s most impressive performance to date. Solomon is wretched and despicable, but Butterfield also manages to deliver enough insight into his desperation to make his descent into radicalization pitiable, which in turn only makes Martell’s performance more complex.

The bottom line.

A film dealing so unflinchingly with something as complicated as school shootings will almost certainly alienate many viewers. But it’s a topic that desperately needs to be discussed, and Boyson’s approach is one of the most thoughtful takes on the subject set to film thus far. For those with the stomach for it, this is an extremely valuable watch.

Our Hero, Balthazar opens in select theaters on March 27th. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Picturehouse.

Brogan Luke Bouwhuis

Brogan is a Salt Lake City-based writer and film festival programmer who has watched more Scooby-Doo than the majority of the human population. You can find him on social media at @roboteatsdino or at roboteatsdinosaur.com