{"id":770296,"date":"2026-09-14T11:10:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/770296\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T11:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:10:12","slug":"lenore-review-incels-obsession-with-online-influencer-turns-into-anatomy-of-dislocated-digital-age-mindset-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/770296\/","title":{"rendered":"Lenore review \u2013 incel\u2019s obsession with online influencer turns into anatomy of dislocated digital-age mindset | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the parasocial phenomenon<\/a> is a kind of hell, then Max Wren, protagonist of this Australian digital-age psychodrama, resides in the ninth circle. Self-barricading in a basement room surrounded by screens, working on a documentary about the object of his disaffection (an enigmatic influencer called Lenore), this obsessive shut-in makes Eminem\u2019s Stan look like the Dalai Lama. Touching on subjects including the attention economy, the male gaze, and incel isolation and misogyny, director David Ward feels both Max and Lenore\u2019s pain. But his ungainly debut film doesn\u2019t fully transcend its stage origins to capture the splintered headspace of the terminally online.<\/p>\n

Like films about fictional pop stars that feature unconvincing music, it doesn\u2019t help that the quickfire r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of Lenore\u2019s career only half-conveys her magnetism. A one-time beauty influencer called Veronica Brand, she later graduates to more extreme performance art-type stunts, such as livestreaming her miscarriage; a move that, spliced without her knowledge into a children\u2019s TV broadcast, forced her into hiding. But this performative vulnerability, including hints of her abusive dad, apparently won her legions of OnlyFans-style acolytes. Not just Max, but also his colleague Sam (Sam Macdonald), a brash interloper outraged to find he was nothing special to Lenore and who turns up at Max\u2019s door offering exclusive footage of her.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Sam\u2019s intrusion, and that of the pair of police who later come knocking, are relayed as bewilderingly loud violations of Max\u2019s sanctuary. This kind of simple sonic effect might have hit hard on stage (the film is adapted from an unproduced play) \u2013 but Ward doesn\u2019t progress into a style that bottles the 21st-century digital cacophony. Instead his film is awkwardly divided between sterile theatrical exchanges and Max\u2019s soliloquies at his stack of tech, and didactic rants from the metaverse in which Lenore discourses about no man owning her.<\/p>\n

Only Max\u2019s mental disintegration, zoning out as Leonore appears to communicate directly with him, threatens a fertile piercing of this barrier \u00e0 la David Cronenberg; and it comes to fruition in a final beatification that turns out to be anything but saintly. Ward can clearly diagnose our dislocated mindset \u2013 but without him finding an idiom to match, it seems unlikely that the average TikTok-addled scrollhead will have the patience to hear the final judgment.<\/p>\n

Lenore is available on digital platforms from 21 September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If the parasocial phenomenon is a kind of hell, then Max Wren, protagonist of this Australian digital-age psychodrama,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-770296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770296","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=770296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}