Writer Alex Russell, whose credits include small screen hits Beef and The Bear, graduates to the big screen with this darkly compelling thriller about a desperate wannabe who attaches himself to a singer on the rise.
A tight, nifty, and unsettling little parable of the pathology of fame in our time.
Lurker 2025
“There’s something remarkably assured about Alex Russell’s attention-demanding thriller… It’s a contemporary pop-culture riff on an obsessive psycho-thriller, the kind we were flooded with in the 90s in which an outlier enters the life of someone who has something they want, recalling Single White Female and The Talented Mr Ripley…
The lurker is Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), a twentysomething retail worker who insinuates himself into the inner circle of rising music star Oliver (Saltburn survivor Archie Madekwe) by pretending not to be a fawning superfan. Matthew, living with his grandmother and seemingly lacking a social life of his own, has to work hard to make his way deeper inside, cleaning dishes and putting up with insults from Oliver’s entourage of laddish yes men, a believably off-putting and juvenile world new to some of us….
Lurker is a film of easy targets, but Russell avoids obvious jabs. While there’s a cynicism that clearly comes from someone who has done his time in both Los Angeles and the industry, it’s ultimately about something more human, and more unsettling, than just Hollywood. There are, after all, lurkers everywhere.” — Benjamin Lee, The Guardian