By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
“I feel like I met you guys for a reason,” perennial hanger-on Matthew, played by Théodor Pellerin (Solo, On Becoming a God in Central Florida), tells Oliver (Archie Madekwe of Gran Turismo and Saltburn), an up-and-coming popstar into whose life he has begun insinuating himself, in Alex Russell‘s new psychological thriller LURKER.
There’s no shortage of sociopathic strivers and stalkers in the movies today. From Red Rooms to Saltburn to Baby Reindeer, the Single White Female school of aspirational stalking is a natural fit for our tenuous, social media-driven world. And LURKER slides as easily into that category as a fan slides into a star’s DMs. Like Matthew’s studied ensnarement of his object of desire, this film is highly calculated, taking a cold, almost nerdy approach to its presentation of the morbid underbelly of modern Insta fame. Presented largely in locked-down medium and deliberately stilted, cringe-comedic wides, it telegraphs its ideas through overt, leading direction that often clashes with the stylized distance at which it holds its characters. While LURKER offers tactile flashes of insight, this unevenness may keep viewers stuck at that same distance.
“How do you know this song?” Oliver asks Matthew when they first meet at the trendy LA clothing store where Matthew works. Having evidently stalked Oliver online over the course of years, Matthew steals the aux cord from his colleague and plays a song the star loves to inspire precisely this question. It’s easy to manufacture closeness, Russell demonstrates in this opening scene, when people’s lives are so public. From there, the two men develop a homoerotically charged relationship (an element is sadly underexplored) that still feels parasocial even in real life.
Soon, Matthew’s cleaning Oliver’s hype house and offering his services as a documentary videographer, capturing glamorously #relatable footage with his oh-so-postable DV cam, saturating fans’ feeds and peppering the film. Oliver carelessly sweeps Matthew into his entourage, unaware of the other’s avidity – even as Matthew’s eyes follow him with the blankness of a true fanatic. His posse (composed of Bottoms’ Havana Rose Liu, Funny Page’s Daniel Zolghadri, Mid90s’ Sunny Suljic and rappers Zack Fox and Wale Onayemi) vies for position, rising and falling in the pecking order based on Oliver’s laid-back caprice. The escalating series of entanglements that stem from there isn’t particularly surprising, though the granular details Russell cooks up still offer novelty and interest.
Though its preoccupations are hyper-topical, LURKER is a story told largely in a vacuum of both tone and substance. Why it is that Oliver, seemingly a successful indie artist, doesn’t have a manager, bodyguards or any representation over the age of 25 is a going question and crucial to Oliver’s ascent into (and eventual dominance over) this world. Class difference is gestured towards by way of a rote (but blessedly brief) subplot involving Matthew’s ailing grandmother, queer parasociality is played with both comically (“hey daddy i miss u” Matthew types, then deletes, at one point) and dramatically (a wrestling match becomes a sexual threat). Still, these ideas are subsumed by Russell’s interest in the kind of fame that films as varied as Der Fan and Ingrid Goes West have explored, presented with sterility. Some scenes are overly telegraphed, while others are overly cold. At the end of the day, some of Pellerin’s staring just feels like staring.
The problem seems to be one of direction. Pellerin still finds places to shine, particularly in moments when his facade slips: A jaggedly edited sequence of panicked texting in a car is memorable, and a climactic monologue is genuinely effective. Ultimately, though, LURKER does little to distinguish itself from other films in this category. “What do you mean this is it?” Matthew asks Oliver angrily, looking at a competitor’s version of an album cover he was supposed to shoot, “We’ve seen this, like, so many times before.” Unfortunately, he’s right.
