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Our Hero, Balthazar
Sat
18
Sat 18 Oct 5:45 PM
Palace Nova Eastend: ExiMax
General Admission
Unclassified 15+
91 MinsOur 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.
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.