Lurker, a MUBI release, is in theaters now.
Lurker (Alex Russell, 2025).
You lose yourself in those people…. Ultimately, what do they want? What do they want from you?
—Martin Scorsese, on the relationship between fans and celebrities
The energy changes when a Person Of Note enters a room. The center of gravity suddenly shifts as bodies contort ever so slightly around their oversized aura. Others are less subtle, and, armed with iPhones, gawk openly at the otherworldly being in their midst. This sort of shift opens Lurker, the directorial debut of Alex Russell, a psychological thriller about a parasocial relationship that becomes symbiotic, and then parasitic. The setting is the clothing store where Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) works. Oliver (Archie Madekwe) wanders in and a fan immediately invades his personal space, attempting to get a selfie.
Matthew and Oliver’s friendship is predicated on the lie that Matthew, prior to this meeting, had not known that Oliver is a pop star. Oliver finds Matthew’s proclaimed naïveté refreshing and, intrigued by the idea of an uninitiated listener, invites him to check out his concert that night: “I need a real person there.” As Matthew gets dressed for the show, we catch a brief glimpse of an “Oliver” shirt hanging in his closet.
Can the unbiased response to artwork Oliver seeks come only from a naïf? A critic can be a fan, and conversely, fandom should not preclude critical distance. “A critic is a person who encounters music, examines her responses, considers the context, and articulates whatever comes up during this process, whether it’s desire, joy, anger, even repulsion,” writes Ann Powers, a critic. “It’s not a thumbs-up-or-down game.”
But contemporary fandom is in its absolutist era. These days, an artist need not publicly comment on a story or review for their fanbase to come furiously to their defense. From personal experience, I know that these armies of sycophants will indiscriminately attack an offending party, perhaps a critic who hasn’t given an album a high enough score, with derisive comments about their appearance and intelligence, even campaigning to get them fired or threatening to kill their innocent pet rabbit. Honest feedback does not emerge from the dogma of adulation.
Lurker (Alex Russell, 2025).
When asked what he thought of the performance, Matthew demurs. “I heard the influences, like, for sure,” he says. “And I can tell… I can tell you really do this. Like that’s… that’s really you up there.” In the end, Matthew’s vague affirmation of authenticity carries more weight than specific musical comparisons or flattery. Oliver is touched, and his reaction gives us a peek behind the curtain of celebrity isolation; he’s surrounded by people who see him as a commodity.
Matthew begins hanging around the Los Angeles pad where Oliver lives with his friends/staff: good-vibes-guys Swett (Zack Fox) and Bowen (Olawale Onayemi), videographer Noah (Daniel Zolghadi), and manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu). It’s unclear if everyone is literally on the payroll, but they are all working on a common project: Oliver. Matthew soon begins filming b-roll for a documentary about Oliver’s next album, never mind his lack of technical skills. “You’ve clearly got taste,” Oliver says. “That’s all you need.”
From behind a large VHS camera, Matthew builds intimacy with Oliver, whose backstory is detailed atop fuzzy footage. “I don’t talk to people like this, man,” Oliver tells Matthew during one (not particularly deep) conversation. “I mean, I guess that means you’re, like, my best friend.”
Witness the veil of persona as it lifts to reveal vulnerability! A Person Of Note is confiding in you, the you who is under-caffeinated and clutching a recorder in the backseat of a car, trying to remember the questions she has prepared without interrupting the flow of conversation. Trust has been won. Perhaps the Recipient Of Interiority shares a personal anecdote about herself, a story she hasn’t shared even with the closest of friends. Later, she returns to her small apartment and shoves her recorder’s USB drive into a MacBook. An AI service transcribes everything, and she quickly deletes her moment of vulnerability from the record. She’s not getting paid to write about herself.
Lurker (Alex Russell, 2025).
The circumstances of Oliver’s career at times recall a more modest and less perpetually online TikTok collab house, “grotesquely lavish abodes where teens and early twentysomethings live and work together, trying to achieve viral fame on a variety of media platforms,” per Harper’s. There are also resonances with the 2017 Vice docu-series American Boyband, which follows the ambitious early days of the now defunct hip-hop collective Brockhampton. After meeting in a Kanye West fan forum in the mid-2010s, fourteen of the members—not just rappers but singers, producers, designers, and managers— moved into a ramshackle house in South Central Los Angeles. Led by the de facto frontman Kevin Abstract, Brockhampton acted as a vertically integrated creative industry. “We make our own merch, we do our own videos, we do everything ourselves,” beat maker Romil Hemnani explains in the opening episode while giving a tour of the so-called "Brockhampton Factory.” Musicians can break into the mainstream from their bedrooms; put another way, they can sleep and eat in the studio.
Russell is intimately familiar with this specific stage of emerging artistry. Not only was he a regular contributor to The Fader and Complex in the mid-2010s, a golden era for self-made Soundcloud superstars; he also collaborated with Brockhampton on the screenplay for a short film, Billy Star (2017). A queer romantic tragedy with minimal dialogue, Billy Star shares Lurker’s fondness for middle-class malaise and complicated relationships between men. Oliver’s smooth, sensitive bedroom pop sounds like an amalgamation of Abstract, Steve Lacy, Dijon, and Rex Orange County (the last two both wrote songs for the soundtrack, and Kenny Beats contributed the score). While Lurker is inevitably informed by Russell’s experiences, it avoids commenting on specific indignities of the modern music industry, from the dehumanizing demand for short-form content to the inequalities of the streaming economy. Instead, Russell highlights the underexplored parasocial relationship between male fan and male artist, issues of tastemaking and talent, and the asteroid belt of hangers-ons in the celebrity solar system.
In Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz describes the “stench of success” as like “burnt cloth and rancid gardenias.” But this fragrance apparently appeals to Matthew, a loner desperate to leave behind his beige home life and kindly grandmother. He is amoral and strangely unsympathetic, portrayed by Pellerin as perpetually uncomfortable, his reactions always breaking the blankness of his visage a beat too late. He’s an unrepentant liar who claims his place through subservience and ill-defined “taste,” which seems to shine only when he’s engineered a situation in which he can humiliate his perceived competition. When Jamie, a former coworker, points out that Matthew has gained a “cult following” on Instagram by his proximity to Oliver, Matthew is obnoxiously humble: His new friends “really get me, and they’re helping me reach my potential as an artist, which is tight.”
Lurker (Alex Russell, 2025).
As Matthew grows closer to Oliver, he furtively exerts control over who has access to him through quiet acts of sabotage. It’s only a matter of time before Matthew’s possessiveness curdles into something more insidious. After Matthew’s access to Oliver is revoked, the former blackmails the latter into continuing the documentary. Now essentially holding his idol hostage, Matthew’s true intentions emerge. Matthew is not trying to pull an All About Eve (1950) and steal Oliver’s career, nor is he planning on killing him and assuming his identity,à la The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). He most definitely wants to sleep with him, though it’s unclear if he’s infatuated with Oliver specifically or the idea of Oliver. Matthew is simply unwilling to relinquish his hold over Oliver. Ultimately, he’s a stan.
Has proximity to celebrity poisoned Matthew, or has he been cruel all along? And why did he lie about his fandom in the first place? There is, cultural critic Mark Fisher writes, “a peculiar shame involved in admitting that one is a fan, perhaps because it involves being caught out in a fantasy-identification.” Adoration can be considered cringe, and some superstars have recently denounced the predatory behaviors of certain admirers. But fandom is a serious business due to the rise of social media and the devaluation of music itself. Over the past two decades, the industry has shifted from a traditional one-sided model (artist creating, audience consuming) to a more participatory dynamic in which artists engage directly with fans on digital platforms. Per media scholar Nancy Baym, a musician is now expected to be “self-promotional enough to remind people that they have something to sell, yet interpersonal enough to make listeners feel connected and eager to spend money on them.” As the line between authentic and perceived relationships blur, is it really so delusional to believe you could befriend your favorite musician?
“What’s the difference between love and obsession?” goes the chorus to one of Oliver’s songs. Late in the film, as Oliver struggles to record the song in a studio, Matthew delivers a twisted pep talk about creativity. Of course Oliver feels lost, he explains: “Right now you’re just whatever your fans want you to be, and of course you’re going to be stuck if you surround yourself with yes people.” It’s not normal, he continues, that his friends adore every single thing he creates. It’s not support, it’s deceit. “Everyone around you is exactly the same as me. Everyone. You’re alone. You’re on the other side. The rest of us, we all want the same thing. I just want it more. And I’m better.” Matthew isn’t wrong; Oliver is surrounded by artifice. How can he expect to know his true self? Both want to be seen so badly, but neither will remove his mask.