It's a story that we have seen many times on screen, typically done better, from ALL ABOUT EVE to THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY. A slightly creepy acolyte of a charismatic star becomes a cuckoo in the nest, usurping the places of the hitherto best friends and ultimately of the star themselves. In LURKER, the star, a feckless young musician called Oliver, is played by the charismatic young British actor Archie Madekwe, who has graduated from usurped friend in SALTBURN to object of attraction here. His stalker, Matthew, is played by Theodore Pellerin, all innocent, voluble face and seething jealousy.
Over the course of the film we see the star, Oliver, quickly pick his lurker, Matthew up, and make him Instagram-famous. Of course, when Oliver and his crew then turn their attention to Matthew's colleague Jamie, Matthew quickly becomes violently possessive. Only Oliver's solo female friend Shai (played beautifully by Havana Rose Liu) is on to Matthew from the start.
The performances are all good, and there are some genuinely hilarious moments of Entourage-style bros hanging out and social satire of vapid, narcissistic stars. But I felt like Alex Russell didn't have the courage of his convictions or the willingness to push the film into more edgy psycho-sexual areas. The result was a film that kind of meandered its way into an ending that felt - dare I say it - derivative of HBO's awful TV series The Idol. In that show we spent a lot of the episodes thinking the star was captive to the lurker only to find out that it was the lurker who was being exploited all along. I don't know who wrote which ending first, but needless to say that this LURKER felt like a stitched together version of so many similar films and shows that I was never surprised by it and never entranced by it.
LURKER has a running time of 100 minutes. It played Sundance and Berlin 2025.
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