Title: Solo
Year: 2023
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: Canada
Language: French, English
Director/Screenwriter: Sophie Dupuis
Composer: Charles Lavoie
Cinematographer: Mathieu Laverdière
Editors: Marie-Pier Dupuis, Dominique Fortin, Maxim Rheault
Cast:
Théodore Pellerin
Félix Maritaud
Alice Moreault
Anne-Marie Cadieux
Vlad Alexis
Tommy Joubert
Jean Marchand
Marc-André Leclair
Roger Léger
Josée Deschênes
Rating: 5.3/10
Title: Lurker
Year: 2025
Genre: Crime, Music, Drama
Country: USA, Italy
Language: English
Director/Screenwriter: Alex Russell
Composer: Kenny Beats
Cinematographer: Pat Scola
Editor: David Kashevaroff
Cast:
Théodore Pellerin
Archie Madekwe
Havana Rose Liu
Sunny Suljic
Zack Fox
Olawale Onayemi
Daniel Zolghadri
Cam Hicks
Myra Turley
Rating: 7.2/10
Here is a new leading man in the making in the Northern American sphere, Canadian and bilingual actor Théodore Pellerin carries in his face a kind of perceptible tremor, as if the camera were always catching him in the instant before he decides who to be. It strikes like an alert hesitation - the look of an actor who knows that identity, in cinema as in life, is only ever provisional. In SOLO and LURKER - in which he successfully procures a leading role - this uncertainty becomes his element. The two films appear to belong to opposite hemispheres - one drenched in bisexual lighting and audacious affirmation, the other muffled, nocturnal, home-video roughness - yet they speak to the same malaise: a generation for whom performance is no longer an act but a condition, and self-actualization often needs some nasty maneuver to facilitate.
SOLO, the third feature-length film from Canadian queer director Sophie Dupuis, opens in an inundation of sashaying movements and blaring music. Dupuis’s camera delights in bodies, color, and the glittering mechanics of drag as though to affirm that blatant expression can rescue us from our crisis. Pellerin plays Simon, a young drag artist navigating love and ambition with the grace of someone perpetually mid-transformation. Everything is in place - the kinetic editing, the choreography of sequins and sweat, the rhetoric of “finding oneself”. And yet, almost from the first frame, one feels the airlessness of a preordained parable. The film celebrates liberation but delivers a catechism.
The problem is not sincerity - Dupuis’s faith in the redemptive power of self-expression is genuine - but the exhaustion of its grammar. Each emotional beat lands where it should, and thus nowhere surprising, plus its dialogue is so frustratingly clunky and tedious that it almost makes one find the Canadian-French accent repulsive (especially in the case of Moreault, who plays Simon’s sister Maude with a pettish absentmindedness). The miscellany of drag performances (an eclectic selection of disco hits from ABBA, Chaka Khan to Donna Summer and others) illustrates the narrative in a blandly repetitive fashion as per a run-of-the-mill old Hollywood musical (they are just there to trying to impress and devoid of any significance). They are embellishments soon run out of appeal and set a rueful example of drag’s monotonousness (on that front, Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping’s FEMME has done a far superior job). One senses what the film wishes to reach - that sparkling moment when costume becomes revelation - yet Dupuis stops at decoration, has no means to actualize that wish.
Pellerin moves within this constraint with visible intelligence but also fatigue. His Simon has grace, bounce, naivety, and enough vulnerability to burn - qualities that oddly suggest an actor not yet permitted to embrace fully of his potentiality. Especially in his scenes with Maritaud’s Olivier, their chemistry remains weirdly lukewarm, and the latter’s half-assing comportment may imply that he signs on the project only to have a ball with drag and lip-syncing, and the truth to be told, his drag performances are all gauche mannerisms can’t hold a candle to Pellerin’s naturalistic va-va-voom.
And yet SOLO (the title betrays the film’s own solipsistic navel-gazing), perhaps without meaning to, captures something crucial about the present. Beneath its polished sincerity lies a fatigue - that sense of endless self-construction demanded by our age of exposure. The young here perform identity not to reveal it but to maintain it; visibility has become their only proof of existence. What the film celebrates as empowerment already feels like forced labor.
LURKER marks the feature debut from Alex Russell (producer and co-writer of popular TV series THE BEAR and BEEF). It is a parasocial tall tale whose premise is not the freedom of self-actualization but its corrosion. Pellerin’s Matthew, a young retail worker in L.A., cunningly ingratiates himself to the retinue of a rising pop star, Oliver (Madekwe), and then has to secure his place there by hook or by crook countering Oliver’s mercurial temperament. The story could have easily spiraled into thriller cliché, and thankfully it does not go off the deep end or lurch into the homicidal charnel house, yet Russell treats it as something more austere - a study in contamination between image and gaze, obsession and pursuit of one’s happiness.
Madekwe channels a laidback celebrity persona and gives Oliver a brilliance too polished to trust. His attitude and patois are calibrated for virality (denoted by the home video footage that can be churned out ceaselessly to one’s heart’s content); he lives as though permanently live-streamed. Pellerin’s Matthew, meanwhile, lives in the negative space of that luminosity. He watches, imitates, merges. The film’s drama lies in the porousness between observer and observed - two figures caught in the same choreography of exposure. When they interact, their scenes simmer with an ambiguity neither erotic nor moral (though Russell does tease us with some man-on-man wrestle to allow the two get physical), but ontological: who exists for whom? Unexpectedly, LURKER tries to build an unorthodox symbiosis between Matthew and Oliver, despite of the former’s insidious blackmail, the irony is that they really can coexist in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The end does speak volumes of the music industry’s insalubrious, backhanded miasma of today, and how the underside of fame and talent can corrupt any soul which stands in the way.
This mode of duality gives not enough space for other characters to breath fully through Kenny Beats’ absorbingly rhythmic and mood-enhancing sound-scrape, save for Liu’s Shai, who has a borderline function as a keen-eyed mediator between Matthew and Oliver, but any superfluous threads are neatly trimmed to fit the main plot development like a glove, whose logic saps a shade when Matthew’s plan to turn the table is revealed to a facile maneuver.
It is too early, perhaps, to speak of Pellerin’s “potential” as the next big thing - a word that flatters uncertainty with prophecy. In SOLO, he submits to the rhetoric of expression and a gorgeous imprint on androgyny down to the ground; in LURKER, he inhabits its more muted machination of earning a purchase in a precarious perch. One might say he has yet to find his axis. His talent feels exploratory rather than declarative - the quality of someone still calibrating his intensity. At times, his presence flickers between control and transparency, as if he’s learning the rhythm of emoting In a culture that rewards overstatement, this reticence is rare, even precious. It makes him difficult to categorize and, therefore, interesting.
What unites these two films, apart from Pellerin’s presence, is a generational melancholy and uncertainty masked as expressiveness. Today’s youth, at least those in the North America, live inside a fragile bubble of self-involvement - whether to live down the fact that a mother will always put her career over her offspring or sign a Faustian deal to achieve one’s self worth, with no fallback position to cushion the blow from. SOLO is the Instagram post - luminous, assertive, momentarily sincere. LURKER is the infinite scroll that follows - hypnotic, alienating, intimate only in its repetition. Together they form a portrait of a generation that has turned exposure into ritual and solitude into reflex.
And Pellerin - anxious, precise, a little spectral - becomes an emblem of his generation. His singular physiognomy (a preposterous nose and a pair of beady eyes) and beanpole physique contain the beauty of uncertainty, the possibility that something still resists being defined. Perhaps that is what remains to be hoped for - not authenticity, that exhausted myth, but mutability: the right to remain unformed, amorphous, to be a work in progress sailing over an uncertain water of endless possibilities.
referential entries: Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping’s FEMME (2023, 7.5/10); Matt Spicer’s INGRID GOEST WEST (2017, 6.8/10).
