Our Hero, Balthazar opens in New York theaters for a limited release on March 27, expanding to Los Angeles on April 3.
By Elazar Abrahams
There’s a lot to admire about Our Hero, Balthazar, even when it doesn’t fully deliver the movie you keep wanting it to become.
Directed by Oscar Boyson, the film follows Balthazar (Jaeden Martell), a wealthy New York teenager who tries to impress a crush by positioning himself as an activist online, only to get pulled into a tense, spiraling situation involving a troll he becomes convinced is capable of real-world violence.
The best thing Our Hero, Balthazar does is that it actually understands Gen Alpha and the internet.
Not “understands it” in the corny way a lot of movies do, where characters speak in hashtags and the screenplay thinks dropping a meme reference is enough to feel current. This film gets the nuances of Gen Z and Gen Alpha awkwardness in 2026. It gets the cadence of how kids talk, how they posture, how they overshare and undershare at the same time. It understands online culture as a lived-in ecosystem, not a parody of one. That alone deserves credit, because so many movies built around internet life end up sounding “cringe af.”
The other major asset is the performances, especially the two leads. Martell is very good as Balthazar, playing a kid who has everything materially but still feels desperate for meaning, attention, and validation. Asa Butterfield, though, is the one who really surprises. He completely disappears into this role as Solomon. He’s so transformed that if you didn’t know it was him going in, you genuinely might not recognize him.
Unfortunately, the movie never quite lives up to its own premise. It feels like it’s constantly approaching a bigger confrontation, a bigger revelation, a bigger “movie” moment, and it just never fully gets there. There are interesting ideas bubbling here about performance activism, about internet radicalization, about how fear and fantasy blur when you’re doomscrolling too much, but the storytelling often stays in a zone that feels too small.
This is still a recommendation for those interested in being tapped into the culture. Our Hero, Balthazar is real and has spunk. A couple things hold it back though, and one wishes it took even bigger swings.
I give Our Hero, Balthazar a B-.
TV and City 