{"id":690932,"date":"2026-07-14T10:23:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T10:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/690932\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T10:23:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T10:23:16","slug":"our-hero-balthazar-interview-the-school-shooter-satire-that-could-be-the-next-adolescence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/690932\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Hero, Balthazar interview: The school shooter satire that could be the next Adolescence"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A masked man stalks the halls of a high school corridor, a semi-automatic rifle raised in front of him. But when the gunman finally reaches a classroom, the children inside do nothing but stare at him blankly, unmoved and unscared. The illusion shatters: this particular gunman is part of an active-shooter training drill. Rather than stopping school shootings, America has built a lucrative private industry devoted to preparing children for the next one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is the opening scene of Our Hero, Balthazar, a provocative dark comedy<\/a> from first-time director Oscar Boyson that finds humour in deeply uncomfortable places. What initially appears to be a film about school shootings quickly reveals itself as a bleakly funny satire about the way tragedy and online attention have become hopelessly intertwined. Rather than using school shootings for shock value, Boyson uses them as the foundation for an exploration of greed, loneliness and growing up on social media.<\/p>\n

The titular Balthazar (Jaeden Martell of the It films) is a snooty, neglected trust fund kid from New York with an uncanny ability to make himself cry on cue, posting tearful videos after every school shooting in pursuit of online validation. When a troll threatens a school shooting beneath one of his performative posts, Balthazar sees a chance to prove his outrage is genuine. Using a fake online profile and deepfakes of his own mother\u2019s voice, he catfishes the troll into meeting him, then travels to rural Texas convinced he can stop the attack before it happens. Asa Butterfield delivers a skin-crawling performance as Solomon, the lonely, trailer-bound teenager at the other end of the screen, whose violent online bravado masks a grim home life.<\/p>\n

The seed for the film came in the aftermath of a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas<\/a>, in 2022, in which an 18-year-old boy murdered 19 children and two teachers. Before beginning his massacre, the gunman messaged a 15-year-old girl in Germany he\u2019d been speaking to online, and told her of his plans. She replied with a single word: \u201ccool\u201d. Later convicted of failing to report a planned crime, her response lingered with Boyson, who cut his teeth as a producer on films by the Safdie brothers, among them Good Time and Uncut Gems. \u201cIt felt like a microcosm of what it\u2019s like to be on the internet today, [and] especially to be a kid on the internet today,\u201d he says. \u201cShe was 15 years old and exposed to all these terrible things and then it\u2019s on her to call the cops? It\u2019s her fault that it happened? It\u2019s just ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AsaAsa Butterfield and Jaeden Martell in Our Hero, Balthazar (Signature Entertainment)<\/p>\n

Our Hero, Balthazar had its world premiere at New York\u2019s Tribeca Film Festival last year, but only after being rejected by both Sundance and SXSW \u2013 important launchpads for independent films looking to find distribution. Boyson has speculated in the past that his movie was overlooked because the subject matter is too provocative, especially in the wake of Trump\u2019s reelection. A dark comedy about a school shooting isn\u2019t exactly the easiest sell. Was it difficult to get made? In a word\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d Boyson tells me, laughing. \u201cA lot of the people your agents tell you you\u2019re supposed to talk to when you\u2019re doing an indie film, none of them wanted anything to do with it,\u201d he adds. \u201cBut I\u2019m the kind of person who, when people say no, especially in the industry, that actually gets me fired up. I don\u2019t have the wildest imagination. For me, it\u2019s hard to come up with something that\u2019s going to stand out, and I knew that if they\u2019re all saying \u2018no\u2019, well, then this will stand out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Boyson says he was able to raise more money than he expected through his industry connections and a group of first-time film investors. That support helped him land a star in Butterfield, the British actor best known for playing the angsty sex therapist-in-training Otis in Netflix\u2019s Sex Education. It\u2019s a great role for an actor in the process of shedding the skin of a familiar character; Butterfield is repulsive as the incel-coded Solomon, disappearing beneath a badly dyed blonde mullet, peach fuzz beard, emo piercings and low-slung denim shorts.<\/p>\n

\"\u2018I\u2018I think we always knew our hearts were in the right place,\u2019 says director Oscar Boyson (left) (Getty)<\/p>\n

Though school shootings remain a uniquely American epidemic, Butterfield says the film\u2019s deeper themes are universal. \u201cLoneliness in young men is global, which really is the heart of the story,\u201d he tells me, appearing from his London home over Zoom alongside Boyson. \u201cOur movie feels like you\u2019re on the inside of this world and these young men\u2019s minds, and you see what has happened to get them there \u2013 their living situations and their sort of shared isolation \u2013 despite their massive differences.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Solomon and Balthazar might be at different poles of America\u2019s class system, they end up forging a bizarre friendship \u2013 one rooted in a mutual desire for connection (the catfishing attempt is quickly forgiven). What transpires is a kind of screw-loose buddy comedy, with the pair cruising round in Balthazar\u2019s car, shooting tubs of supplements that Solomon\u2019s dad has attempted to palm off on him. One of the film\u2019s best running gags is the name of the father\u2019s pyramid scheme testosterone company \u2013 Thrush, a portmanteau of \u201cthrill\u201d and \u201crush\u201d. Wanna buy some Thrush?<\/p>\n

Comedy feels like a fine line to tread when it comes to the bleak subject matter here, but Boyson does it elegantly, using satire to expose the contradictions of modern masculinity that breed resentment in young men like Solomon. Not every filmmaker has navigated the topic without controversy. Earlier this year, the Robert Pattinson\/Zendaya black comedy The Drama drew criticism<\/a> for revealing Zendaya\u2019s character had once planned a school shooting, with advocacy groups arguing that the film had turned a real-world trauma into an edgy plot twist. March for Our Lives, the group founded by Parkland survivors, said in a statement: \u201cWhen something like a school shooting is treated lightly or played for irony, it raises a deeper question: what kind of conversation is this meant to start?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ItIt takes two: \u2018Our Hero, Balthazar\u2019 evolves into a twisted buddy comedy (Signature Entertainment)<\/p>\n

Boyson wasn\u2019t worried about experiencing a similar backlash. \u201cI think we always knew our hearts were in the right place,\u201d he says. He is more worried that people will be too scared to talk about school shootings at all. \u201cThat\u2019s the annihilation mentality,\u201d he says. \u201cNobody wants to talk about it, because to talk about it is to admit that you can\u2019t change anything. To admit that you can\u2019t change anything is to admit that you don\u2019t live in a functioning democracy. It\u2019s brutal, but we have to talk about this stuff.\u201d Humour, he adds, \u201cincreasingly feels like the only way to navigate it as a storyteller\u201d.<\/p>\n

Butterfield hopes their film will spark conversations similar to last year\u2019s Adolescence, Netflix\u2019s cultural juggernaut about a teenager\u2019s descent into a world of online misogyny. \u201cWhat I think our film does differently from Adolescence is that it\u2019s really aimed at young people as a representation of what they\u2019re going through,\u201d he says. \u201cWhereas Adolescence felt like it was more from the perspective of parents on the outside looking in, and not knowing what\u2019s going on. I think this will really speak to all sorts of young people \u2013 a lot of Gen Z.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without spoiling anything, Our Hero, Balthazar ends on a circular note, suggesting the cycle of gun violence and online outrage will repeat itself indefinitely within the current status quo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the director is similarly pessimistic about whether things will eventually change in the US. He remembers the survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting \u2013 which surpassed Columbine as the deadliest high school shooting in US history \u2013 and the massive #NeverAgain movement they created. \u201cThey were paraded around the country, and the media made them feel like they could actually change something,\u201d he says. \u201cThen nothing happened. Like, what does that do to your psyche? To be Time\u2019s Person of the Year, and nothing changed at all.\u201d He harks back to his film\u2019s opening sequence with the active shooter training: \u201cYou just have to laugh, because instead of doing something nice for kids and making them feel safer\u2026 we just turned it into a multi-billion-dollar business.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Our Hero, Balthazar\u2019 is in cinemas from 16 July<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690933,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-690932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}