A thriller of “little social calculations”: Alex Russell on why ‘Lurker’ is really a film about friendship
How far would you go is the big question Alex Russell’s debut feature, the psychological thriller, Lurker, asks of its audience.
On the surface, the film is about obsession and success, opening with Matthew Morning, played by Théodore Pellerin, working in a retail job when musician Oliver, played by Saltburn breakout Archie Madekwe, walks into his shop. Matthew essentially pulls the move all fandoms on the internet have been obsessed with forever: the ‘your name’s Oliver’, pretending that he doesn’t know him, remaining unfazed, all while putting on what he knows is his favourite song, sparking up a connection and quickly falling into the artist’s world.
From there, it spirals down the toxic rabbit hole of the entertainment world. Specifically, it spirals into the LA music world, which, from talking to friends who have lived and worked there, isn’t too dissimilar from even the extremes Russell gets into. At first glance, this is a film about people doing anything they can to make it, examining it from all angles that surround a shiny new star and seeing just how white and brutal knuckles can get from digging nails in, trying to cling on.
However, this is Russell’s first film, and as we sit down to talk during the last outing of its press run, after months of interviews about it prompting him to analyse it, he seems to have landed on something else, realising that really this is a film about friendship in a lot of ways.
“The spark for me was just a feeling that applies across a lot of experiences I’ve either participated in or observed among groups of male friends,” he told Far Out, “Sometimes that’s in high school, or sometimes it’s in the LA music scene, which I just felt was like an extreme version of what I was trying to explore.”
In this way, LA and the music world explored in Lurker isn’t so much a setting, but is a microcosm, a metaphor even, for friendships shared between men.
“Once I thought of it through the perspective of a hanger-on, or someone who’s on the membrane of being outside of something or inside of it. That’s when it sort of clicked for me,” he explained, as suddenly, the topic of music in the movie kind of became besides the point. That was simply something Russell knew about, the industry something he was used to, but rather than Lurker being about that, it’s actually about what he witnesses inside of it, which was an intricate, wild and intense dance of different social insecurities.
It’s been an enjoyable experience for Russell himself to sit and talk about this movie, with the archetypes of the parasocial fan and the toxic music industry all over this film. Matthew and Oliver both feel like recognisable figures we’ve seen in culture over and over, but while it would be easy enough to talk about Lurker purely through the lens of the music business, it becomes more interesting for the cast and director to look beyond it.
“I never really thought of the movie in terms of like, fame or fandom or anything. I understand that it’s kind of about that now,” Pellerin said, with the film’s own leading figures really only just still realising things. But they were zoned in on the relationships, not the context.
“I think to me, it’s always more about the friendships and our, you know, toxic friendships, and really just trying to be accepted by a group or by someone, or having intimacy, creating intimacy, having closeness,” he mused.
That was the entry point of how cast got connected with their characters, and is likely why these performances are so emotionally compelling. For Madekwe, it wasn’t about embodying the classic ‘next big thing’ and the stresses or career pressures of that; instead, he was thinking about the air of insecurity that never seems to fade.
“I was just thinking about how many times you’ve heard someone be like, when they get into a particular in crowd, be like, ‘you think it’s weird if I ask them for this? Like, it’s weird if I ask them for tickets, or it’s weird if I ask them if I could message this person,” he pondered, “That’s about like, saving face, and staying a part of the group.”
For Russell, that hits the nail on the head. Lurker is about exactly that awkward dance between appearances and the desire to connect, or to fit in. “That is a great, small social calculation example of what this movie is about, for people that aren’t, you know, in the exact scenario as the movie,” he said.
“This movie is about those little social calculations. Like, why would you ask? If that is weird, what is the insecurity there? What’s the fear? And typically, it comes from the fear of being outcast, I think, or just the fear of people looking at you differently, or, you know, it’s an identity thing,” he added, boiling it down to the true core question of Lurker.
It’s not so much how far you would go for success, but instead, it’s how far you would go to fit in. To feel accepted.
