Hollywood has put pop stars through the ringer lately. Lady Raven squared off against a serial killer in Trap, Skye Riley faced an even darker entity in Smile 2, and now, an up-and-coming artist named Oliver (Archie Madekwe) is facing what may be pop stars’ most sinister (and certainly their most realistic) enemy yet—parasociality.
2024’s biggest buzzword gets its inevitable thriller in Lurker, a new film from The Bear and Beef writer-director Alex Russell. Described as an “exhilarating cat-and-mouse thriller made for the moment,” Lurker follows a retail worker named Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) who worms his way into Oliver’s inner circle, blurring the line between friendship and fixation. Oliver’s fanaticism also inspires a fun new addition to the canon of aggressively on the nose fake pop songs; “What’s the difference between love and obsession?” Oliver croons throughout the trailer. That’s the question the film will attempt to answer.
Russell was inspired to write the film by the way celebrities are “positioned or placed as a form of deities, like gods,” as he told IndieWire around the time of the film’s Sundance premiere. “Relating to Matthew is very important because the movie is subjective in that way, whereas a lot of movies about an obsessive person… there’s a separation between the audience and the character, and it’s a little more like, ‘Oh, look at this crazy guy that’s not me,'” he continued. “In showing the movie to people, people are sort of guiltily relating to him.”
