Lurker: They Long To Be (Close To You)

For a concept as young as stardom is, stories that obsess over it are dime a dozen. And I eat it up everytime. It's as old as film stars themselves—the it factor, the something in the power celebrities can have over us that stands at such odds with how we, the public, give them power. It's relentless, a matryoshka of give and take that makes up the overarching tension Lurker doesn't so much play with as it does bask in its heat, eroding as it spirals to a close.

Awkward retail worker Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) finagles his way to the orbit of up and coming popstar Oliver (Archie Madekwe), ingratiating himself inside his crew, his home, his routine. But as the lines between friend and fan overlap, Matthew’s desire to be close to him teeters into the demented—then clatter, smash, the film’s hierarchy turned on its head for a cat and mouse thriller where nothing is certain. Ingrid Goes West comes to mind, so does Saltburn for those stuck on Madekwe’s supporting turn (it's a good one)—yet Alex Russell’s feature is more elusive, vibe-y and evocative, that in a different media landscape it could have been a key touchstone for a generation too consumed by screens and aching for proximity to the people inside.

Russell has much style in curating these manipulations of the display, his camera clipping across mixed media lenses and pop art filters populated by villainous acts of desperation. Lurker…lurks on the edge of a knife, lithe and strange with a remarkable agility to alter, re-encode, and react to the moods of its performances. Madekwe plays Oliver with intense gravitational pull, like his own solar system. He's always been magnetic in other work, but here he has room to be much more dynamic: he's attractive, fickle, crowding the frame with long limbs and an affected ease that goes cold at the drop of a hat. The ultimate vision of a star—brighter than the eye can handle. That Madekwe has charisma, has IT, is essential; he makes you want to watch him, which works to the film’s favor when he unspools to a hot mess. 

Pellerin by contrast operates on a constant pile of nerves, needy, anxious, like a cipher who can't believe his circumstances. And it reads masterfully. The actor brings a real rat-faced sociopath type of vibe to the function that I really appreciate, that if Madekwe’s performance is the sun at its center then Pellerin’s is scuzz and gravity pinning it to the ground, and what illustrates the film’s core thesis. The two actors vie for control in a film that keeps its cards very close to itself. A wrestle, a dance: how far would you go to get what you want, when you don't know what you want at all? So many moments Matthew dodges the question, Oliver unable to answer, how as Matthew heat-seeks he becomes as much the object he sees Oliver as, how neither can name what's happening between them: if it's violence or affection. 

In any other film this kind of lack would be a detriment, but for Lurker it's a feature, an important one. The ambiguity the film leads with is a provocation, with a point; it's a freaky decomposition of not the business or psychosis of fame, but the spirit of its artistry, the chase, the race. Lurker is star-screwer cinema, BRAT but red, a dark oblivion of content creatives and their very many vices. Where dreams go to die and attachment hops on meth amphetamines. Crazy, sexy, cool: the album, the aura, the whole enchilada.