Asa Butterfield in Sharp Dark Comedy

Social media identities, gun legal guidelines and the blue state/pink state divide are however a number of the points touched on in Our Hero, Balthazar, the zeitgeist-tapping darkish comedy receiving its world premiere on the Tribeca Movie Pageant. Alternately disturbing and brutally humorous, and ending with the type of capper that completely encapsulates its provocative ethos, this marks an auspicious directorial debut for Oscar Boyson.

Not that it’s significantly stunning, contemplating that the tyro director, who co-scripted with Ricky Camilleri, has beforehand produced such edgy movies as Good Time and Uncut Gems. This effort, whose title is a sly riff on Robert Bresson’s basic Au Hasard Balthazar, follows within the custom of these Safdie brothers movies which can be designed to make you’re feeling uncomfortable.

The title character, fantastically performed by Jaeden Martell (It, Knives Out), is the type of wealthy Manhattan teenager with an indulgent mom (Jennifer Ehle), his personal private life coach (Noah Centineo), and a tony non-public college training. Social causes don’t curiosity him, however a fellow classmate, Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), very a lot does. The 2 develop into pleasant once they each play victims in a mass taking pictures simulation at their college, every lined in pretend blood.

Eleanor’s pet trigger is gun prevention, so to impress her, Balthazar, or Balthy for brief, begins organizing protests and posting emotional movies on the topic on-line, his performing abilities rising to the fore. However Eleanor rapidly figures out that he’s probably not being honest.

“Are you truly crying?” she asks him after watching certainly one of his tearful movies.  

“I feel it’s good to be a part of a group,” he says.

Balthy’s postings come to the eye of a younger man in Texas, who taunts him and divulges his intention to commit a mass taking pictures at his college. In a daring stylistic transfer, the movie then segues to introduce us to Balthy’s on-line tormentor, Solomon, an aspiring “complement salesman” who doesn’t even have any luck trying to promote the weapons his father gave him as a result of they’re missing serial numbers. He’s the type of misplaced younger man who angrily however unconvincingly denies that he’s an incel. And he’s brilliantly performed by Asa Butterfield (Hugo, Sex Education), practically unrecognizable with blond hair and goatee, in a revelatory efficiency.

Satisfied that Solomon will make good on his menace, Balthy impulsively travels to Texas and strikes up an IRL relationship with him, trying like a fish out of water. Regardless of their apparent variations, the 2 have an odd rapport, with Solomon educating the urbanite the way to shoot weapons and telling him, “You is perhaps the primary particular person I met who’s weirder than me.”

Balthy finds himself assembly Solomon’s loving, invalid grandmother (the all the time good Becky Ann Baker) and abusive father (Chris Bauer). He additionally rapidly figures out that Solomon is hardly the menace he claimed to be. “I assumed you have been a faculty shooter!” he exclaims disgustedly. However issues inevitably take a darker, violent flip that leads to tragedy and a supremely ironic ending.

Director Boyson expertly balances satirical social commentary with emotional reality and sophisticated characterizations, infusing the proceedings with a Hal Ashby-style deadpan darkish humor. Channeling the anxieties of a youthful era so infused by on-line tradition that they’ve hassle separating fantasy and actuality, Our Hero, Balthazar may be very a lot a movie of its second.