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Our Hero, Balthazar
2025

Our Hero, Balthazar

A privileged, performative teen becomes convinced an online troll is a school shooter and drives across the country to confront him. Our Hero, Balthazar is a jet-black satire of performative activism, fragile masculinity, and the hunger for attention in Gen Z culture.

Director

Oscar Boyson

Runtime

91 Minutes

Country

United States

Classification

Unclassified 15+

Our Hero, Balthazar is a jet-black satire that confronts the absurd extremes of digital-age masculinity and self-validation. Balthy (Jaeden Martell), a wealthy Manhattan teenager, creates tearful gun control videos for social media to win over his activist crush. When a provocative troll catches his attention, he convinces himself the person is a school shooter and impulsively drives to Texas to confront him.

What unfolds is a darkly comic and unsettling journey through solitude, entitlement, and the collapse between empathy and spectacle. Balthy’s uneasy connection with his troll, Soloman (Asa Butterfield) becomes a hallucinatory mirror of performative empathy and social alienation. Anchored by Martell’s striking vulnerability and Boyson’s sharp direction, Our Hero, Balthazar skewers how validation-seeking, masculinity and performance intersect in the age of social media. This satire cuts deep, refusing easy sympathy, instead laying bare the perils of living for the algorithm.

“An uncompromising satire about the crisis facing young men in America.”

The Film Stage

"A satire of male loneliness that is as disturbing as it is hilarious.”

Exclaim!

Tribeca

Film Credits

Director

Oscar Boyson

Year

2025

Country

United States

Language

English

Type

Feature & Fiction

Program Strand

World Cinema

Producer

Oscar BoysonRicky CamilleriDavid Duque-EstradaMiles Skinner & Jon Wroblewski

Writer

Oscar Boyson & Ricky Camilleri

Cinematographer

Christopher Messina

Editor

Erin DeWitt & Nate DeYoung

Cast

Becky Ann BakerAnna BaryshnikovChris BauerJaeden Martell & Asa Butterfield

Film Source

Visit Films

Genre

Black Comedy & Satire

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