Every Fake Hero Needs a Fake Villain 

If a random internet troll messaged you out of the blue claiming they’re going to shoot up a school, would you shrug it off and say “yeah right,” or would you do something about it?

This is the question writer/director Oscar Boyson (Good Time, Uncut Gems, Frances Ha) asked when conceptualizing Our Hero, Balthazar. Inspired by the events of the Uvalde shooting in Texas, where the shooter admitted his plan to a 14-year-old German girl hours before the attack; she, like most of us probably would, blew him off with a one word response: “Cool.” Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but you can’t blame her for her reaction. She was a kid who lived halfway around the world. What was she supposed to do?

Balthazar is the answer to the question: “what kind of person would actually try to do something about it?”

There has certainly been a shift in the air about how school shootings are presented in media lately. This year, we’ve seen not one, but TWO highly praised school shooting indie comedies take the film world by storm. While The Drama tackles the situation from a far-removed retrospective perspective, Our Hero, Balthazar situates itself firmly in the immediacy of the act.

And like The Drama, OHB is not really “about” school shootings in a literal sense. It’s about the conditions that orbit them: isolation, loneliness, digital radicalization, and the quiet social failures that accumulate around young people long before anything catastrophic ever occurs. It’s about the self-mythology of online identity, and the desperate need to be witnessed by someone — anyone — on the other side of the screen.

At the center of the film are two young men who construct themselves through performance.

Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) is a manipulative and narcissistic opportunist who lies about anything and everything in order to get what he wants. He cries for sympathy likes online — crocodile tears played for attention and a borrowed sense of passion and values. Psychiatrists will have a field day deconstructing this guy.

But Balthazar, as corrupt as his motives may be, is still fulfilling a decent act — at least on paper. Regardless of why he’s trying to stop Solomon from shooting up a school — for likes, for fame, or for the eye of a girl he likes — he’s still doing something. But one thing’s for certain: he’s definitely no hero.

What’s more likely is that he did all of this just to impress the girl he likes at school, win attention from his mother, and create a heroic narrative for himself. It’s all for personal gain rather than the greater good. Some may argue whether Balthazar genuinely wants to stop violence at all. He really just wants to be seen doing it.

Solomon (Asa Butterfield) is an internet troll. He lies about being a shooter in order to ruffle the feathers of strangers online. He’s a sad, lonely boy, pushed to the brink by his family, his job, his living situation, and society as a whole. All he really needs is a friend, and he’s more than willing to play the part of the shooter in order to keep Balthazar around.

Solomon is 100% incel-adjacent if not full-on. He’s radicalized and damaged, with a bleaker future by the day. He acts out dangerous fantasies, and exaggerates threats in order to keep Balthazar’s concern. He’s broken, but not evil.

Neither boy is fully what he claims to be. But the film is less interested in exposing truth beneath performance than in showing how performance itself begins to replace truth under certain pressures.

As their interaction intensifies, the boundary between roleplay and intention begins to blur. The question becomes less about what either of them “really is,” and more about what happens when two people reinforce each other’s worst scripts.

Does intervention create safety, or does it inadvertently escalate harm? Does the desire to stop violence require imagining it so vividly that it begins to take shape in the process? Or was the danger already there, waiting for any interaction to sharpen it into focus?

The film refuses to settle these questions.

Balthazar and Solomon are truly two sides of the same coin. But while one fetishizes victims, the other fetishizes perpetrators. Neither of them are authentic. They’re each performing for a different audience.

In a world where authenticity is currency, both of these men are bankrupt — cosplaying as wealthy.

A crucial part of the story is how both boys are shaped by absence. Both sets of parents are absent, exploitative, and/or self-interested.

Balthazar’s dad is out of the picture — pays for everything, but would rather keep Balthazar out of sight and out of mind. His mother (Jennifer Ehle) is emotionally unavailable, and too invested in career advancement and her own shade of performative activism to even spend time with her son on his birthday.

Solomon’s mom is dead and his dad (Chris Bauer) is an ex-pornstar turned manosphere entrepreneur, peddling bullshit supplements to vulnerable individuals as part of a manipulative pyramid scheme — even going as far as to rope his own son into the grift.

The adults are incapable of providing meaningful guidance. Instead, they compound their own flaws onto their children — blissfully unaware or even indifferent to their struggles.

In both cases, adulthood is present but ineffective. Authority exists, but care does not. What gets passed down is not stability, but a set of distortions — ambition without empathy, ideology without grounding, attention without responsibility.

When these two young men collide, something unstable forms between them. Each becomes a necessary role in the other’s internal story: one as the would-be saviour, the other as the looming threat. But both roles are constructed, both are performed, and both depend on being seen.

While the German girl ignored the message from the Uvalde shooter because she recognized it as internet noise, Balthazar responds because he takes his performance seriously. After all, every fake hero needs a fake villain, and neither of them are truly what they claim to be until they meet each other.

Does Balthazar push Solomon to this villainous extreme? Is stopping a mass shooter something he can only do by manufacturing one himself? Does Solomon become more dangerous because Balthazar enters his life? Or was Solomon already on the brink of snapping? Would anything have changed if Balthazar had done nothing?

The film never offers an easy answer to the question Boyson poses at the beginning. Maybe Balthazar prevents a tragedy. Maybe he helps create one. Maybe both things are true at once. What Our Hero, Balthazar understands is that in an age of online performance, attention has become its own kind of currency, and people will play almost any role to obtain it — hero, victim, villain, or all three at the same time.