Lurker (2025, Alex Russell)

55/100

Got hooked immediately, not so much by Matthew's rather transparent manipulation (quickly shifting the in-store speakers to his phone and playing a semi-obscure Nile Rodgers track he knows via social-media research that Oliver loves) but by the way that he shrewdly feigns ignorance of who Oliver even is, understanding that ostensibly not being a stan makes him seem far more appealing. I really dug Québecois actor Théodore Pellerin earlier this year as a cuddly introvert in the French drama Nino, and he's equally strong here playing someone borderline sociopathic—in particular, he's underplaying what I'm fairly confident is meant to be a queer subtext (DISCLAIMER: I am straight and sometimes clueless about such matters, though that usually involves me failing to pick up on queerness rather than inventing it), keeping that aspect subtle enough that there's never any sense of gay = depraved. First-time filmmaker Alex Russell, on the other hand, doesn't exactly have a light touch, accompanying early scenes of Matthew doing Oliver's housework with James & Bobby Purify's "I'm Your Puppet" and then actually playing that song again later on when Matthew blackmails Oliver into submission. Actually, the whole blackmail aspect seemed over the top to me, and only Havana Rose Liu (Isabel in Bottoms), assuming a series of quietly alarmed expressions as Matthew worms his way into Oliver's inner circle (while leaving it productively uncertain whether Shai's concerned for Matthew or Oliver or both), joins Pellerin in avoiding bluntness. Plus Lurker suffers from what I call the Great Art Problem, with a conclusion that requires what we see of the documentary Matthew directed to be flat-out astonishing, which it plainly is not. That's Ed, still a fairly compelling portrait of parasociality transformed into something both real and toxic. And we're gonna get a undeniably great Pellerin performance in the near future, I predict. Remember the dude on the bus in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, who returns near the end? That's him.