Mass shootings and social media combine to fry the humanity of rich New York kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and poor Southern kid Solomon (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield) in Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut. Co-writing with Ricky Camilleri, he dodges the moralising high ground and experiential dread of previous online and shooter films, preferring to satirise his antiheroes from the inside. The comedy is snarkily black, the ironic vacancy where authentic selves used to be all-consuming, even the title’s comma arching an eyebrow. The honourable intent is to savage gun laws and the attention economy in the callous language of its teen participant/victims. The result is as queasy and ugly as its subject.
There are The Graduate vibes as Balthazar blankly observes his mum (Jennifer Ehle) and politician lover on the mutual make in their penthouse pad, and his prosperous future is laid out by his life coach (till, in a typical transgressive push, the teenager’s fake rape claim sees him off). “Everyone has to grow up, Balthazar,” he’s told. Into what, though, as the incipient American psycho is chauffeured to a gun law protest and squeezes performative tears for “cryfluencer” likes. He bonds with scholarship classmate Eleanor (Pippa Knowles) over the grisly capitalist inanity of a school visit by a “global leader in mass shooter preparation training”. “Only in America…we’re just chasing the violence we create,” Eleanor knows, as they role-play student corpses with extra death-shudders.
Balthazar is meanwhile online with a Texan teen who seems to be contemplating a copycat shooting, and tries to seduce Eleanor with real massacre footage. “Are you actually sincere?” she asks. “That’s a good question,” he muses, hardly able to understand it. Best known as the wholesome leader of IT’s childhood gang, Martell channels Kieran Culkin’s twitchy sneer as he vacantly views these upper-class and online wastelands.
Meanwhile in a Texas trailer park, we meet the supposed would-be shooter, Solomon. Far from the hulking, hoodied monster of Balthazar’s fantasies, he lives with his doting grandma and suffers under the toxic spell of dad Beaver (Chris Bauer), a sex/meth addict and manosphere guru who gets his credulous son hawking dodgy testosterone supplements in return for crumbs of attention. When Balthazar catfishes Solomon by cloning his mum’s voice to fake femininity and crosses America by Greyhound to meet, his ruse is exposed and the two oddball loners become awkward friends, clinging to each other amid loveless adults and aghast girls, and shooting guns into the Southern night.
Texas is where Boyson takes most tonal risks, as his tyro East Coast elitist uncomprehendingly wanders through working-class Red state America, eyes glinting as his taste for real violence grows. Solomon is more offbeat, as British actor Butterfield tries to blend his yearnings, battered decency, alienation and threat. The presence of guns isn’t Chekhovian but simply American, bound to claim corpses.
Characters and milieu rarely ring true (despite Boyson casting real Texan townspeople in minor roles), and the situation and resolution are also outlandishly inauthentic. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) and Justin Kurzel’s Nitram (2021) are among the gruelling shooter films which have gone this way before, minus social media but conveying awful hurt without the po-faced literalness Boyson fears. Our Hero, Balthazar adopts teenage boy boundaries of taste without compensatory, coherent feeing. Balthazar’s snotty disdain infects it.
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