Before he slaughtered 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Salvador Ramos DMed a girl he had met and only knew online and told her he was going on a killing spree.
Even though there was little she could have done, and even less reason to believe she took him seriously, she was charged with failure to report planned crimes. Writers Ricky Camilleri and Oscar Boyson have extrapolated the script for Boyson’s feature directorial debut, Our Hero, Balthazar, from those exchanges, and asked a tragically meaningful question: What if she had done something?
The tragedy is wrapped in absurdist comedy in this oddly, awkwardly, importantly compassionate and timely twist on the story of the town mouse and the country mouse. It’s also a surprisingly deep exploration of social isolation in teenage boys and how rapidly that can go off the rails to terrifying effect. However, Boyson and Camilleri have a bigger target than the trite “crisis in masculinity” that’s been grabbing headlines and powering the toxic manosphere.
The town mouse in this instance is really a city mouse, rich kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell, Y2K, Arcadian). A wannabe influencer, he spends his time bouncing between his high-end Manhattan private school and his high-floor Manhattan apartment with its $50 million view, feigning emotions for online likes as he weeps and blubbers in front of his ring light. He’s perfected fake tears – even he doesn’t really know how he does them – and real emotions aren’t something he’s great at, as shown when he ineptly tries to woo the school’s socially aware token poor kid (newcomer Pippa A. Knowles). His idiotic plan for wooing her is to find a potential school shooter and convince them to … well, not shoot up a school.
The idea of making light of the American plague of school shootings seems absurd, bordering on obscene. And it would be here, if it wasn’t for the fact that Camilleri and Boyson humanize Balthazar (Balthy to his friends and absentee family) but more importantly give depth to Solomon, the trailer park kid in Texas who Balthazar thinks he could “save.” Only, he’s no school shooter. As extraordinarily portrayed by Asa Butterfield (Hugo, Ender’s Game), he’s a classic mixed-up kid, and like many mixed-up kids today he has access to way too many guns.
But he’s not a killer. He’s a sad, friendless, semi-smart and under-educated young man who yearns for his father’s approval and desperately tries to keep a roof over the head of himself and his grandma. The only things he’s shooting are giant, unsold containers of an off-brand testosterone supplement, and the only thing he’s blasting is Japanese rock band Babymetal on the stereo of his battered-up beater.
Both teens are models in abandonment. Solomon is just fending for himself below the breadline, while Balthy’s mom (Jennifer Ehle) is off swanning around cocktail parties. That recognition of loneliness pervades the unlikely friendship between them, yet all the while constant class awareness is a seething subtext, given focus by their dis/similarities. While Martell gets under the skin of Balthy’s brilliantly faked emotions, Butterfield knows how to let Solomon bubble over with misdirected internal chaos, switch-backing in seconds between a childish, high-pitched giggle and furious self-harm. There are glimpses of the ways that the two could maybe save each other, but in their well-depicted and very different histrionics there are all the red flags about the potential for violence.
Setting the bulk of the film in Texas and filming it here gives Our Hero, Balthazar a sickening sense of authenticity (Boyson discussed at its Tribeca Festival premiere that the location was selected because of both the mythology of the Lone Star State, and its utter otherness when seen from New York). There is humor, but there is also constant tragedy, and when Solomon’s father (Chris Bauer) turns up, a bull and a bully, it’s hard not to feel anything but sympathy for the doomed young man.
Nurture – or rather the lack of it – wins out over nature here as the caustic influence of class is increasingly brought to the fore. The way that Balthazar blithely and obliviously dismisses Solomon’s fears about getting kicked out of the trailer park because the rent is going up is superficially played for laughs but is ultimately as shocking as the horrifying final shots of each character. It may start as a comedy but Our Hero, Balthazar becomes an increasingly uneasy watch. However, it may be an essential one.
Our Hero, Balthazar
Viewpoints, World Premiere
Thursday, June 12, 9:15pm, AMC 19th St. East 6
Sunday, June 15, 5:45pm, Village East by Angelika
This article appears in June 6 • 2025.