written by Leah Greenblatt, The New York Times
When the 34-year-old writer and producer Alex Russell, best known for his credits on the Emmy-winning TV series “Beef” and “The Bear,” was working on what would become his feature directing debut, “Lurker,” he went to the Los Angeles Zoo to visit the chimpanzees there.
“Among chimps, everyone knows their place and there is a very clear alpha hierarchy,” he said via video call from Los Angeles. “They have this thing where they establish an alliance by picking sticks and stuff out of each other’s hair. But sometimes, which is very funny to me and very ‘Lurker,’ they’ll groom, and the other one doesn’t groom them back. It’s like, ‘OK, you are the one who grooms me. That’s our deal.’”
Those Darwinian lessons appear both literally — you can see the iPhone footage Russell shot at the zoo that day playing in the background of one scene — and figuratively in the movie, which follows the toxic pas de deux between a rising pop star called Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), a fan who becomes his friend, employee and possible saboteur over the course of 100 fraught, perspective-shifting minutes.
A word-of-mouth hit when it premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival, “Lurker” (in theaters) plays like a slippery and supremely of-the-moment psychosexual thriller, albeit one that also belongs to a classic cinematic tradition: part Gen-Z “All About Eve,” part “Single White Female” for young men raised on Tumblr confessionals and Drake mixtapes.
The sand traps and tribulations of fame take a central role, but so do the tricky dynamics of any friendship built on uneven footing. Or as Kenneth Blume, the real-life music producer behind Oliver’s earworm-y onscreen balladry, put it in a video interview, “I couldn’t even place Matthew by the end of it. Does he want to [expletive] Oliver? Does he want to kill him? Does he want to be him?”
“Lurker” began as a Covid-era writing exercise for Russell — “just a test to see if I could write something longer than half-hour television” — that bloomed unexpectedly. “I was feeling a lot of things about relationships among 20-something men,” Russell said, “and I didn’t know how to express it other than in the form of this nightmarish screenplay. And to this day, it’s the easiest thing I ever wrote.”
The relatively unknown French Canadian actor Pellerin (“Becoming Karl Lagerfeld”), 28, was brought on not long after the script’s completion to play Matthew, a watchful 20-something who lives in a nondescript ranch house with his grandmother and spends his days working retail at a cool-kid clothing store in L.A. That’s where he first encounters Oliver, and wins points with the wary star by pretending to have no idea who he is.
Madekwe, 30, came with an established résumé in zeitgeist-y films like “Saltburn” and “Midsommar,” though his first “Lurker” audition — he initially tried out for the Matthew role — got lost in the mix, and he didn’t land the part as Oliver until 2023. In the movie’s bait-and-switch opening scene, fittingly, it’s not immediately clear which character is the pop singer and which is the acolyte.
“It’s just Théo’s charismatic performance that makes you think that,” joked Madekwe, who joined Russell in a three-way Zoom call from his native London, while Pellerin beamed in from Montreal. “It’s his energy pulsating through the screen.”
Still, Madekwe imbues Oliver with silky, unpinnable allure — an intimidating shift to inhabit, particularly after imagining himself as Matthew. “I was assured that there would be no music in the movie,” he said, “and I kept asking, ‘Are we sure?’ Cut to, I’m making a full EP. I’m doing live concerts in front of people and recording with an incredible producer. There is no stepping one foot in, one foot out when you’re in the booth and there’s a string quartet.”
Russell hadn’t even intended to make Oliver British, but he liked the evolving idea of the character that Madekwe presented. “It was just a really tricky role to cast because we needed this guy to be believable as a star,” he said, “and to be able to do the music and to show the depth and vulnerability that comes later in the movie and also the aloofness. That’s a lot to ask.”
The story is set in motion when a chance meeting at the store where Matthew works leads to a casual invitation to Oliver’s show that evening, where the shy nonentity — Pellerin deftly cloaks his Québécoise accent beneath a laconic Southern California drawl — faces a hazing from Oliver’s inner circle, many of whom seem to blur the line between friend, hanger-on and support staff.
Matthew emerges from his shell just enough to pass the test and quickly finds himself folded into Oliver’s world as a sort of provisional Boy Friday, lowest on the totem pole but willing to do whatever it takes, whether that means washing dishes at Oliver’s house in the hills or working as a D.I.Y. cinematographer for his new boss’s “Jackass”-style antics. He even gets to go to Europe for the first time, a trip captured in impressionistic flashes.
Soon enough, Matthew is being stopped in the street by kids breathless for advice and connection; his proximity to celebrity has made him a star to them, too. But as other bystanders and would-be B.F.F.s continue to compete for Oliver’s attention and Matthew finds his status in the crew slipping, he resorts to increasingly drastic (and morally questionable) acts.
“For Ollie to come into the store where he works, it was like Matthew’s one chance to be seen by someone completely unreachable,” Pellerin said. “It really is a vision, an ideal of life. And so I think there is a big disillusionment as the movie goes on — him learning that, ‘Oh, there are codes and ways to navigate this.’ And everybody around him, they’re not really angels, they’re just little people like him who know how to be there.”
“I sent Théo a lot YouTube videos, just behind-the-scenes stuff of L.A. people hanging out,” Russell said of Pellerin, who comes across on Zoom as polite, diffident and a little otherworldly. “Because what people won’t know is how truly alien this world is for him. It is so not his lifestyle or how he behaves or what he is even interested in.”
Madekwe did his part to embed his co-star in Hollywood absurdity as well. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but Archie took me to Paris Hilton’s birthday party before we started shooting,” Pellerin said. “It was very fun for me to be in front of a lot of characters that I had never met, but who really exist in that town.” (Madekwe seemed unruffled by the disclosure; “Put Paris in the special thanks,” he deadpanned.)
Much of the movie hinges on the authenticity of Russell’s careful scene-setting: the clothes, the slang, the after-after parties. And of course, the music. Crafting Oliver’s sound fell to Russell’s longtime friend Blume, who as Kenny Beats has produced hits for artists including Gucci Mane and Vince Staples. “There were times when I made Archie sing a line 50 times,” Blume said. “But it was more about, ‘Can you be a little laid back and a little offbeat and a little bit raspy here?’ We were just being very, very detailed.”
Showing the off-notes and fissures proved integral to a story that purposefully avoids smoothing out its darker, more discomfiting corners. “Lurker” takes a turn in the final act, and ends on a note of sly ambivalence. That’s how Russell envisioned it. “I think people are invested in both characters at different times,” he said. “Their sympathies waiver or fluctuate. And the fun of the movie is, ‘Where do you draw the line?”
Featuring work from Editor David Kashevaroff, ACE
