This year’s White House Correspondents Dinner broadcast an impression of America as a rogue and narcissistic nation—unable to keep even its highest-profile events free of gun violence, ruled by people who insist on making every last thing about them. In other words: a decent take on 2026. The fact that one troubled man managed to get through a security checkpoint with two guns before being tackled isn’t so shocking in a nation of 342 million people and, per some studies, between 400 and 500 million guns, a nation where school children face this same threat every single day. But what struck many observers was just how many of the politicians and journalists turned the event into emotive “content”: acting “as if they did a tour in Vietnam [because] they were at the WCHD,” per political writer John Ganz, turning the camera on themselves as they huddled under tables, shooting trauma selfies, sharing their feelings on live feed, and otherwise behaving like just the teenage characters in Our Hero, Balthazar, a dark comedy that offers a merciless critique of the America that produces this kind of spectacle every day. 

Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut follows two teenage boys from opposite ends of the class structure who’ve been privately deranged by the 2020s: TikTok, Instagram, early AI, and the other digitally-empowered addictions that are fueled by rage and disgust, which this film shows to be as lethal as firearms. It is that quietly mind-boggling entertainment product, a school shooter black comedy, playing alongside the Oscar-winning short documentary All the Empty Rooms, about actual school-shooting victims. 

Is such a film too much, too soon? Or is it purpose-built for the season? Now that the Onion News Network has seized Infowars from its villainous founder, Alex Jones, this film offers a chance to reboot conversations around men, social media, and gun violence, as long as we don’t look away.

This isn’t easy. The script by Boyson and Ricky Camilleri goes hard at targets on either side of today’s political divide, and it both triggers and plays with our contempt for people we deem “performative.”  It’s a smart and uncompromising plunge into a host of contemporary pathologies, every bit as dark as American Psycho and as uncompromising as the films of Larry Clark, Harmony Korine, or Todd Solondz. And it offers no solutions other than those you might extrapolate from the spectacle it unfolds—foremost among these “Don’t be like Balthazar.” 

Played by Jaeden Martell, Balthazar, or “Balty,” is a pretty vacancy, a hothouse flower with a dimpled Culkin-esque face and an ability to cry on command. The kid is a creep from the moment we meet him, standing in his parents’ $50 million New York City penthouse, bathed in the soft glow of a ring light and conjuring tears that cease the second he’s done recording: “This loneliness is killing me,” he mewls, moments before he’ll walk out his bedroom door into a sprawling penthouse filled with chattering guests. “Are you lonely too?” 

Without a single reference to actual influencers, Balthazar steeps us in the manospheric world of rootless young men adrift in social media and driven by a need for attention, praise, and connection—guys who must negotiate an online world of over-emotive “feels” combined with a constant and vicious shaming for same. 

Balty’s opening performance, and the teary young onscreen faces that open the trailer, refer straight back to the 2007 Ur-text, Cara Cunningham’s viral cri de coeur “Leave Britney Alone,”—only updated for the age of  mentalhealthTikTok. Its characters live in a world largely formed in reaction to the early age of online emoting, a space whose most toxic forces have mobilized against “empathy” and virtue signaling, whose campaign slogan is “fuck your feelings.”

A school-shooter drill at his elite Manhattan high school brings a meet-cute between Balty and a passionate female scholarship student: the two volunteer shooting victims chatting as they lie in a corridor, dabbed in fake blood. When the girl, Eleanor, offers a sharp activist’s take on the disconnection and desensitizing forces that enable school shootings—as close this film gets to a thesis—Balty becomes fixated. Thus begins his arc as a Gen-Alpha Travis Bickle: unable to connect with people, his mind cooked by isolation and unprocessed needs, his quest to win a girl’s approval ending in an act of violence the media will misinterpret as heroic—Taxi Driver as Instagram Reel. 

The drama kicks off when Balty seizes a comment on one of his emo posts and, in its dark musings about self-harm and a recent school shooting in Arkansas, sees an opportunity for heroic action. Balty will befriend this troubled youth who goes by “deathdealer_16,” prevent another Arkansas, and watch as the entire world smashes the like button on Balty—even if he has to catfish his target into an IRL meeting, 

But once Balty does, in Fort Worth, Texas, deathdealer_16 quickly proves disappointing: just a downtrodden kid named Solomon (Asa Butterfield) who shares a trailer with his disabled grandmother, works a dead-end job, doesn’t know how to talk to women, and sees his only shot at a future in joining his estranged dad’s Alex Jones-like scheme to sell manhood-restoring supplements to the would-be alphas that these hucksters summon to “war.” Solomon’s desperation for approval blinds him to the exploitation from the two men in his life, his not-so-recovering addict and former porn actor dad, and the sneering rich kid who keeps insisting that he act more like he’s planning to shoot up a school.

Here, Our Hero Balthazar skims right along the gutter of U.S. depravity—bedroom gun stashes, casual sadism, violent pornography, edgelords, trolls, patricidal fantasies, the daily humiliations and empty promises of life at the bottom—and presents a world that’s instantly recognizable yet rarely observed so frankly onscreen. The film fairly sizzles with a dark, transgressive energy, largely in its refusal to condescend to its characters, turn them into cartoons, or to adopt any of the approved discursive modes for addressing these particular hot-button issues. It offers neither conservative thoughts and prayers, nor liberal pieties about gun control and safety nets. In fact, it only landed at last year’s Tribeca Festival after getting rejected by both Sundance and South By Southwest and censored by the Motion Picture Association—evidence that it just might be meeting this insane moment. 

Yes, the film is triggering. But one its greatest coups is in the precise way it might trigger the viewer, who may find themselves inwardly recoiling at these simpering male adolescents—“Shut up! Stop sniveling!”—then instantly feel implicated in the dark forces it depicts.

Even more so as it becomes clear that the potential school shooter at the heart of this story is its only real innocent: motherless and virtually fatherless, unable to outgrow either his childhood anime hero or the tiny, miserable life that poverty, addiction, and fate haven’t made Instagrammable enough without some desperate final act. 

Our Hero, Balthazar pulls on an intergenerational thread of media that centers its drama on a school shooter—Gus Van Zandt’s Elephant, Lynn Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Pearl Jam’s 1992 song and music video “Jeremy,” inspired by a 15-year-old Texan who shot himself to death in school—but it speaks to a generation in which accessible firearms slot into a more constant, inescapable insanity. 

Theirs is a world of viral videos that show, say, MAGA firebrand Charlie Kirk being fatally shot while talking about gun violence. A nation whose leaders revel in vulgarity and verbal violence then insist on a federally enforced period of mourning after their hero Kirk’s death: issuing a call to war through crocodile tears. 

In a final coup-de-grace, the film follows Balthazar from a bloodbath in Fort Worth to a media interview in his sprawling New York City apartment, where he brings all his emoting skills to bear in a performance that echoes Kyle Rittenhouse’s in a courtroom five years ago, when the Illinois teenager wept for the cameras over all the trauma he suffered by killing two people and wounding a third with a stolen AR-15 that he brought to a Wisconsin protest. 

His is just one of the many male faces you see in the film’s final scene, as Balthazar addresses his potential accusers who are watching at home. Looking deeply into the camera, he turns on the waterworks and—stealing a line from his activist crush—whimpers, “We’re fighting for our lives.” Performative empathy and virtue signaling: This film shows these can be weaponized too. And it proves something we might have clocked from clutch performances by everyone from R. Kelly to Brett Kavanaugh to Alex Jones, that onscreen tears never look more toxic than when deployed to get away with murder.