Our Hero, Balthasar

Jodi Picoult

Oscar Boyson's film examines, with a social and psychological mood, the social drama and the condition of young people in the contemporary United States: a mosaic of apparent privileges and hidden vulnerabilities, loneliness, performance drive, and latent nihilism.

Balthazar embodies the affluent youth who has everything except what matters: a father who is practically absent, a mother distracted by relationships and external ambitions, an implosive life behind gilded facades. The boy lives in an apartment overlooking the Met, goes to an elite school, and has a personal coach, but when his mother decides to spend the weekend elsewhere (even on his birthday) and he is left alone, he realizes that wealth does not equate to presence, affection, or community. His search for visibility through videos is revealed to be more a cry for help than a deception, an attempt to give himself an identity, to be seen, to feel important. But in this attempt, the film shows us how much social performance substitutes for real connection. Balthazar's privilege isolates him: those close to him admire him, fear him, but do not touch him. He is surrounded yet alone.

Solomon represents the flip side of the American coin: he lives with his grandmother in a mobile home or trailer park, works in a supermarket, and has an unscrupulous father who reappears only to exploit him and gain some money. Here, loneliness takes on harsher contours: it is not just a lack of affection; it is a lack of resources, of prospects, of any kind of possibility—so much for the "American dream"! The boy is balanced between anger and invisibility, and in that invisibility, the idea of the massacre takes refuge—an extreme act to be "seen" or "feared." The film captures well how the availability of weapons—in a US cultural and legislative context—generates a real risk: a desperate young person has the tools to translate anger into tragedy.

One of the central turning points of the film is the way the social network era amplifies loneliness while simultaneously creating illusions of connection. Balthazar posts, comments, and goes live, but the feed does not correspond to the lived experience. Solomon navigates between memes, trolls, dark chats, and all the tension grows in a virtual bubble where performance replaces dialogue. Visibility can become both a panacea and a trap: on one hand, the desire to be recognized, on the other, the obsession with always being present, with the risk of plummeting into a parallel reality. In an environment where a school is already equipped for a potential amok-shooting, youth loneliness becomes a potential detonator.

In this sense, the gun issue is not a secondary theme: it becomes a metaphor and a reality. In the America of the film, weapons are easy to find. Wealth does not cure neglect; poverty does not immunize against the desire for an explosion. Schools are now accustomed to managing "lockdown drills," meaning anti-shooting exercises. In every institution, there is a "school safety office" or a "safety officer": a person or department dedicated to internal security, often in collaboration with the police, and students are trained to react to a potential shooting.

In a society that has lost its sense of reality: life is individual, private, visible-as-image. And when social connection, empathy, and sociality fail, the weapon becomes the ultimate tool for individual manifestation.

What does it mean to be seen? What does it mean to matter? What is the value of the other when the other is a digital entity? What space remains for vulnerability, for error, for affection? Balthazar and Solomon, each in his own way, are caught up in this: the former tries to prove he is a "hero," the latter contemplates destruction as a way to be seen. The rich kid and the poor boy become two poles of the same condition of disaffection: one less visible but equally dangerous.

A film about American "youth": fragments of class, fragments of identity, fragments of reality. Wealth does not absorb loneliness; poverty amplifies the risk. Social media builds the illusion of connection, and the availability of weapons structures the possibility of tragedy. It is not a moralizing, didactic film, but a bitter reflection: the "culture of trauma" becomes a system, visibility becomes a commodity, and isolation a widespread condition.

The film is striking for its lucidity in looking at contemporary America without accommodation: the nervous direction, the setting that ranges from Manhattan to Texas trailer parks, and the constant use of digital language and chats make the representation plausible and disturbing. But it is not just "reportage"; it is a discourse: what are we becoming when connection is a feed, recognition a like, and presence a comment? When the "protected school" can still be the scene of a massacre, it appears as a logical—but also moral—paradox.

And if the title declares "hero," one wonders: who is the hero today? The one who films his protest for Instagram? The one who threatens violence to be finally "seen"? The film naively overturns the image of the active and viral teenager and shows that, behind the feed's hero, there is a lonely, abandoned, frightened body. That disruptive force can be oriented towards good—or towards annihilation.

George Carlin