Our Hero, Balthazar: a Manhattan of grievances, shot through with satire

The line lands early, in a Manhattan apartment where the air itself seems lacquered: "I think it's nice to be part of a community." The speaker is Balthazar, the protagonist of Oscar Boyson's debut feature, and the line reads at first as a credential of liberal belonging, the kind of thing one says at a fund-raiser. The reviewer in the Guardian's print edition, published 13 July 2026, treats the line as the film's tonal key: a sentence that begins as satire and ends, quietly, as a confession. Boyson, a long-time collaborator of the Safdie brothers, has made a film about two men who meet online, despise each other by design, and then collide in a Manhattan loft where the rent is too high to maintain the pretence of hate.

Our Hero, Balthazar is, on the evidence of the Guardian review, a small film with a large subject. Balthazar is a Manhattan rich-kid turned street-corner activist whose politics are performative in the precise sense the word has acquired online: rehearsed for an audience, brittle in private. Across the digital barricade is a Second Amendment absolutist, a freelance bigot whose every post is calibrated to wound. The film's wager is that these two characters are not opposites but mirrors, separated only by which grievance they have decided to monetise. A late act of mass-shooting violence, treated as both inevitable and unbearable, is the satirical detonation the movie has been laying since the opening credits.

Two men, one lease

The premise is the joke, and the joke is the point. Reviewer Peter Bradshaw, writing in the Guardian on 13 July 2026, describes the film as a homoerotic comedy in which enmity is a courtship ritual. Balthazar, played by a performer the review does not name, drifts into a cohabitation with the troll after a sequence of coincidences that the film stages as farce. They argue about the dishes. They argue about the Second Amendment. They argue about who is allowed to use the word "community." The apartment becomes a chamber piece, and the chamber is the American internet: two bodies in a small room, a large vocabulary of insult, and nowhere to go.

The humour is scabrous, in the reviewer's word, and the film's politics are deliberately difficult to place. Boyson is not interested in adjudicating between the activist and the troll. He is interested in the rhetorical furniture they share. Both men are fluent in the cadence of the online moral panic. Both treat strangers as material for a line. The movie's structural joke is that removing them from their respective feeds and forcing them to share a kitchen produces, against every commercial expectation, intimacy.

Satire that refuses a verdict

The film's gun-violance climax is the section the Guardian flags most carefully. The review reads the sequence as a refusal of catharsis. A mass shooting is staged with the flat affect of a security-camera feed, and the film does not let the audience off the hook by locating blame in a single speech or a single character. The troll's worldview is grotesque. Balthazar's earnestness is a different species of the same thing. The shooter, when the shooter appears, is a third party whose grievance the film does not bother to explain, because explanation is the alibi the movie is indicting.

This is where the picture earns its title. Balthazar is not the hero of the film's narrative so much as its diagnostic case. He is the well-meaning man who has confused being loud with being right, and who discovers, too late, that loudness has a market. The troll is the entrepreneur of that market. The reviewer reads the ending as bleakly funny rather than despairing, but the bleakness is the point. The film is a comedy about loneliness dressed up as politics, and the gun is the punctuation mark.

The Safdie shadow, and after it

Boyson's credits include work on the Safdie brothers' films, and the influence is visible in the production's appetite for New York surfaces: the wet asphalt, the late-night bodegas, the doormen who are also stage directors. But where the Safdies tend to harden their characters through plot, Boyson softens his by setting them at cross-purposes and then refusing to intervene. The film is slower than the Safdies' work, and the comedy is colder. The review suggests that this is the right calibration for a subject where warmth would be a form of permission.

The result is a film that the Guardian's critic frames as an "audacious" debut. Audacious is a critic's word for a picture that is prepared to lose the room in order to make a point it considers non-negotiable. The point, in this case, is that online grievance is not a deviation from American political life. It is the medium in which American political life is now largely conducted. A film that wants to say that has to be willing to depict two men who believe they are arguing about the world and who are, in fact, arguing about whether they are allowed to be lonely out loud.

What the framing leaves out

The Guardian's review is sympathetic but not uncritical. The reviewer notes that the film's third act risks the very simplification it claims to be indicting, and that the troll character, in particular, is drawn close to caricature. The reviewer is also careful to position the picture inside a wider 2026 conversation about incel culture and political violence, a conversation in which the movie is clearly intervening without naming its interlocutors. The film does not pretend to be journalism, and it does not pretend to have a programme of solutions. It pretends to be a comedy, and it is, until it isn't.

The larger question the film leaves with a reader is the one its own protagonist cannot answer. If community is the word both men use to describe the audiences they have built for their respective performances, then the work of building a community that is not a target list is the work the film declines to do. The Safdie-adjacent production polish and the Manhattan location shoot are the parts that travel. The argument is local. It is also, on the evidence of this debut, durable.

Desk note: Monexus framed the review around the film's structural argument about online grievance rather than its production pedigree, on the view that the picture's political claims are more durable than its Safdie-adjacent credentials. The Guardian's 13 July 2026 review was the sole source consulted; quoted language is drawn from that piece.