Quick Synopsis: A wealthy, performative New York City teen (Balthazar) travels to Texas to befriend an online troll (Solomon) he believes is planning a school shooting
Our Hero, Balthazar, which I will call OHB (pronounced Oh-bie) because I know if I keep typing it out I’m going to misspell Balthazar at some point, is a weird film. I haven’t seen a film with this few likeable characters since I watched the news. To be fair, the two characters are:
- A self-loathing incel who dreams of violence.
- A narcissist who fakes being passionate about school shootings because he’s interested in a girl at his school.
And that’s basically the setup. Two deeply unpleasant people become involved in this story about school shootings, masculinity, narcissism and America’s gun culture. On paper, that sounds like the setup for a pretty savage satire. Unfortunately, OHB seems to be much more interested in showing us how fucked up everything is than actually doing anything particularly interesting with it.
You can’t make those characters likeable. Well, you could, but it would be very difficult. The only character who is even slightly likeable is Eleanor, a classmate Balthazar is interested in. She is appropriately disgusted when Balt tries to make a move on her while they’re discussing school shootings. Even after he becomes a national hero and starts appearing on the news, she’s still so disgusted by him that she leaves him on read. Honestly, I’m much more interested in her story. She’s played by Pippa Knowles, I have no idea who she is, but she absolutely nails the performance here. She also gets one of the best lines in the film:
“This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. It’s only in America where we have such easy access to guns, coinciding with a zero-sum economy and the monetisation of narcissism, all of which push hopeless, lonely people, kids, into an annihilation mentality”
Boom! That’s it. A character who says that is a character I want to spend time with. The line comes during a school shooting drill, which is depressingly appropriate. The fact that the American solution to school shootings is essentially “train students how to hide” rather than “stop handing out guns with cheese at Walmart” is both horrifying and depressingly accurate. At one point, the guy teaching the drill tells the students, “you are the last defence against a mass shooting.” Last defence? Wouldn’t “first defence” be more accurate?
From that moment, from that interaction, you’d think this would be incredibly biting satire. It’s not. If anything, it’s “slowly gumming to death” satire. It has an interesting point, but takes WAAAAY too long to get to it. If this was a short, it would be one of my favourites. But as a feature-length film, it takes forever to do nothing, so it’s hard to continue caring. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a 30-minute drum solo: very good for a while, but slightly tiresome the longer it goes on. The problem isn’t that there’s nothing here. There is. The problem is that the film keeps making the same point long after you’ve already got it.
It does have a lot to say. Not just about gun culture, but also about masculinity, loneliness, narcissism and the way we turn damaged people into celebrities. The problem is that it doesn’t really know what to say about any of them beyond holding up a mirror. It asks a lot of questions, but has no interest in answering them. There’s no real examination of why these things happen, or what they might say about the society that produces them. It’s basically a film of: “You know this thing everybody accepts is bad?” “Yeah?” “I think it’s bad too.” “Erm, okay.”
And perhaps that’s why the ending frustrated me so much. It takes what could have been the film’s biggest question: what happens when someone like Balthazar is rewarded for all of this? The answer seems to be, “he wins.”
Spoilers from here on: Balt insults Solomon and threatens to make him homeless. During a fight, a rifle is discharged, killing Solomon’s mother. Balt then shoots Solomon in the head and frames him for his mother’s death. He presents it as another example of youth violence, before going on TV and becoming a national hero.
I wasn’t a fan of the downer ending. Do we really need another film where rich people win? Unlike Bad Apples, I wanted a coda here. I wanted some clue that Balt didn’t get away with it. Not necessarily because I needed him to be punished, but because I wanted the film to do something with the idea it had spent so long setting up.
The film seems to be arguing that everyone can be a shit, but money, narcissism and media attention can turn the right kind of shit into a national hero. That’s actually an interesting idea. I just wish the film had something more interesting to say about it.
I don’t hate this movie. But I don’t like it. It has all the ingredients for a delicious satire: gun culture, masculinity, narcissism, social media, wealth and America’s obsession with turning people into celebrities. The problem is that it never really cooks with any of them. It just lays them out on the table and points at them for two hours.
Essentially, it’s a cinematic Hello Fresh.
