Sundance: Archie Madekwe and Théodore Pellerin Kill It in the Thrilling Hollywood Satire, 'Lurker'

It feels as if there have been a lot of films lately about the noxious side effects of Fame—a woe-is-millionaire subject which (with all due apologies to the many movie stars I adore) is not of prime interest to me these days, for reasons I assume many of you can all decipher. (Cue me waving furiously at the world on fire.) Using that subject as a prism to refract our transient grasp on what Success equals in this unsteady moment however, well that’s a lot more interesting—a Hollywood horse of a different color, you might say. And that’s thankfully the mark where Lurker, the thrillingly dark and funny first feature from The Bear and Beef writer-director Alex Russell which just premiered at Sundance, lands, and with a ferocious precision.

Never has “fake it until you make it” taken on such a sinister edge as it does here, where we watch Los Angeles nobody Matthew (Théodore Pellerin, chilling and brilliant) slowly but assuredly insinuate himself into the inner circle of an up-and-coming music star named Oliver (Archie Madekwe). And yes it’s just Oliver, one name, like Cher and Charo before him. And yes it’s hard not to think of Saltburn, given Madekwe was in that movie which just happened to be about a menacing nobody named Oliver homoerotically insinuating himself into the lives of people way up the caviar-chain.

Lurker keeps itself far more grounded than Saltburn’s operatic theatrics however (and no shade meant toward Saltburn, which I adore), while also giving the fabulously talented Madekwe a lot more to do this go-round. And he makes for a completely believable pop star quivering on the verge (showcasing his own fine singing and stage presence doesn’t hurt). A London transplant currently renting a killer mid-century house atop the Hills that he and his circle of gamer-bro buddies have slathered in cheeto dust and cocaine, Oliver is right now famous enough to be filling up smaller venues and to get shrieked at and chased on the street. (His social media presence also seems to be on point, but that’s a given.)

He hasn’t quite crossed over to the big-time yet though, and he seems fretfully aware of that—that what he does next is the thing that will push him over or alternately murder his momentum. And at this crossroads, where his ego and talent are brushing against uncertainty, enters Matthew. A boutique clothes-store employee who lives with his grandmother, Matthew is extremely good at creating and/or seizing onto circumstances that benefit him without really making a big show of it. Like when Oliver just happens to walk into his store one day, and Matthew just happens to grab control of the store’s music system and turn on an obscure track that hey-whaddya-know turns out to be Oliver’s favorite. Kismet! Why Matthew didn’t even know that Oliver was a singer, wink wink.

That’s just the first of many, many extraordinary “coincidences” that befall these two fellas, which just happen to make them quick friends. Oliver, pretty oblivious to anything that’s not directly in front of him at any given moment, doesn’t seem to notice. But the people around him certainly do, and the furious jockeying for position beside the famous dude becomes Lurker’s main plot thrust. His couch-surfing pals Swett (Zack Fox) and Bowen (Olawale Onayemi) are easily enough swayed by a dumb act of dick-swinging, but Oliver’s sharp-eyed assistant Shai (the great Havana Rose Liu from Bottoms) clocks onto Matthew’s act immediately—in one fell swoop, amusedly looking him up and down, you can see she’s sorted out this exact mess for Oliver a dozen times already. (And Havana Rose Liu needs to be a star, like yesterday.)

But Shai can’t quite clock the stealthily sturdy opponent she’s met in Matthew, whose calculations turn out to be both ten steps ahead and simultaneously able to turn on a dime—Pellerin plays his big goofy eyes to the hilt, but for all their outward doe-ishness they’re far more sociopathic than that. Great empty orbs sitting atop smiles with no feeling.

Only as Matthew’s forced to flail around to keep his grasp on what he wants does it become clear there is no bottom to this boy’s angling—Lurker would fit in right beside the Single White Female boom of the 1990s but to its credit it insistently keeps an even keel, flattening its particular derangement to meet Matthew’s cold remove. The closest it gets to hysteria is the closest the film comes to embracing the homoeroticism that’s been floating about between our buddies during a giggly wrestling scene for the ages—Matthew, for all his self-determination, seems to remain a mystery even to himself. And that’s the most terrifying bit of all.

Because one eventually gets the sense that Matthew has no idea why he’s doing any of this, except that it’s just what you do now. We’re all vague creatives, picking up props and pretending to be the people who would hold onto said props until something happens, or until we’re forced to grab onto the next prop. Learning as we go, swinging about precariously, the transactional nature of late-capitalist living turning us all into some sort of parasitic creature. Long lines of them, Human-Centipede-ing ourselves unto infinity. We all lurk into the shadows and chasms of chat-rooms and behind cameras, devouring facts and figures and Insta-filters, shitting out self-consciously disposable culture in our wake. An army of A.I. brains setting the oceans on fire so we can up our friend count. Ahh Lurker, devastatingly incisive Lurker—I see you, you see me, and now what is there to do but mutually assured immolation.