Lurker is All About Eve by way of Nightcrawler, with a little bit of The Talented Mr. Ripley thrown in for good measure. Or is it a love story, albeit a bit of a fucked up one? 

Matthew Morning (Théodore Pellerin) is working retail alongside Jamie (Sunny Suljic) at an LA boutique clothing store when mononymous musician Oliver (Archie Madekwe) comes in one day. Matthew quickly puts “My Love Song for You” by Nile Rodgers  on the shop’s sound system, and Oliver is impressed by the man’s musical taste, resulting in Matthew being invited to hang backstage at Oliver’s show that night. Oliver’s entourage member Swett (Zack Fox) and producer Bowen (Wale Onayemi) haze him a bit by making him drop his pants, but when he goes one further and loses his underpants as well, it endears him to them immediately. Matt notices a quiet member of the posse, Noah (Daniel Zolghadri) lurking in the back of the green room before he meets Oliver’s manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu), who takes note of Matty’s apparent infatuation with Oliver and recommends that he find a way to make himself useful if he wants to stick around. When he’s invited to hang out the next day at Oliver’s luxurious home, he finds himself stuck doing menial house chores like taking out the garbage and washing dishes while Bowen and Swett play Call of Duty and watch nature documentaries and Oliver largely seems apathetic to his presence. When he captures some candid footage on a low-res Sony commercial video camcorder of Oliver goofing around in the driveway on a BMX, Oliver lights on the idea of having Matty hang around and work on “the documentary,” which creates friction with Noah, who is the crew’s “official” documentarian. When Matty’s former co-worker Jamie also starts to work his way into Matty’s new social circle, Matty goes to increasingly harmful lengths to ensure that his place in the hierarchy remains unchallenged. 

Lurker is about many things. Matt’s behavior is nebulous; although he’s willing to escalate to physical harm and extortion to remain close to Oliver, the exact reasons are ambiguous enough to offer multiple interpretations. The most straightforward possibility is that Matty is simply obsessively in love with Oliver, and although Oliver himself is only ever clearly seen in the sexual company of women, Matty’s reaction to Oliver’s physical (but most likely platonic) affection demonstrates that the singer is the object of his desire. It’s clear that Shai sees Matt’s desire to be in Oliver’s orbit and may even see that attraction to Oliver as she encourages it initially, while his male friends tease Matt for “sounding like one of [Oliver’s] bitches.” Matty is clearly affected by Oliver’s attention to him, with the bits of fraternal physical affection that Oli gives him acting as an emotional drug, and Oliver’s candid vulnerability with the newest member of his entourage is perhaps too encouraging to the unstable videographer. At one point late in the film, Oliver asks Matty why he’s even around, and Matt tells him that he’s there for the same reason that everyone else around Oliver is, it’s just that he’s more driven and “better at it,” in his own words. It’s not stated explicitly, but the implication is that Oliver’s group, which he previously compared to a family of his own choosing, is made up of clingers-on and sycophants trying to ride his coattails into a life of glamour. As an audience, I don’t think we’re meant to fully believe him and his stated motivations, as this supposed reasoning aligns with some of the things we’ve seen (Matty pretends not to know who Oliver is when he first appears in the store while clearly actually being invested in impressing him with his obscure musical knowledge, which wins him a bid at the golden ring of being in Oli’s crew) but also fails to explain the more psychosexual desire that Matt clearly has. 

The latter of these reasons is on fullest display in two scenes in the film. After Matt has successfully created a situation that allows him to blackmail himself back into Oliver’s home (if not his good graces), Oliver makes an attempt to steal the evidence from Matt’s room while he sleeps, but when Matt wakes up, Oliver lies that he wanted to check in on Matt and see if there is some way to get them back to being friends. Matt seems to accept the sincerity and immediately demands that they wrestle, tangling his limbs with the musician and rolling around with him, over the latter’s protests. Still later, when Oliver is on tour, Matt shows up with a girl to the hotel room where Oliver is hooking up with a woman and the two have their sexual encounters next to one another, Matt staring intensely and lovingly at Oliver the whole time. It’s this last that finally pushes Oliver too far, but for his part, Oliver seems to enjoy the attention at times, as there’s a bit of narcissism inherent to his entire career. Early on in the film, Matt tells him that he thinks Oliver has the potential to be the biggest star in the world, and for a moment it seems like he’s pushed his own apparent sycophancy too far to be believed, but after a beat, Oliver excitedly admits that he thinks the same and that the other members of his crew aren’t pushing him hard enough. Matt feeds into Oliver’s ego and the fact that it comes with a side helping of intense yearning doesn’t set off any alarm bells for Oliver until it’s too late. 

The basic scaffolding of this narrative is, as noted above, very much like All About Eve, with Oliver as the Bette Davis/Margo Channing of the feature, a widely known star, and Matty as Anne Baxter’s Eve Harrington who seeks that same level of fame and adoration. Although he does ultimately see success, the film ends at the premiere of the documentary, and when a fan expresses admiration and inspiration, it’s like the finale of Eve in which a young girl comes to Eve’s hotel room in much the same way she once appeared at Margo’s stage door. Matty takes it further, pushing Jamie off of a ladder (after already trying to separate him from the group at the airport) when he gets jealous of Oliver’s preference for Jamie’s ideas for the album cover over Matt’s. Where Patricia Highsmith’s Ripleyness comes from is in the nature of unstated queer obsession that runs as an undercurrent throughout the whole thing. Matt’s “in love” (read: obsessed) with Oliver, wanting to be with him but also to be him, and it’s all conveyed with great attention to detail. Aside from the use of outdated camera equipment to genuinely create an aesthetic that is so desirable that it’s often recreated digitally, what Matt’s bringing to the table with his old Sony camcorder is something that could easily be accomplished through Instagram style filters, but there’s a true commitment to the essence of truth that Oliver wants to convey with his art, and there’s something to be said for that. 

What I found to be one of the most interesting things about the film is the way that it explores the nature of what it feels like to utterly hate someone who sees you better than anyone else. Although Swett and Bowen treat Matt like a pariah once he blackmails his way back into being part of the crew, he either ignores this or is completely apathetic about it, as all he really wants is what he has: access to Oliver, even if the vibe has shifted completely. Everyone’s mistrust of him and their overt hatred for him is covered by Oliver’s having to keep playing Matt’s game, and even if it feels insincere to us in the audience, it’s sufficient to feed Matt’s internal need for Oliver’s attention and validation. In the end, however, after all that Matt puts Oliver through as part of a creative vision for Oliver’s next album, when Oliver sees the resulting footage for himself, he realizes that Matt has accomplished what he said he would: push Oli when the others would let him rest on his laurels with the fame that he already has. It doesn’t hurt that Oliver himself has dubious ethics; when Matt arrives for his first show, the musician is canoodling with a woman that Swett and Bowen picked out of the crowd for him, and the fact that this is a habit for Oliver is something that Matt is able to use against him. Exactly what Oliver did that Matt has footage of is ambiguous enough that we don’t necessarily turn on him, but allows room for doubt as to how honest any of his interactions are, up to and including his claims to Matt that he can be more honest with him than any of the others. What is it in Oliver that only Matt can see and capture? Is it a genuine (if criminally obsessive and jealous) love that Matt has? Is it a consuming desire to see Oliver become the best that he can be because of that love, or because he, Nightcrawlery, wants to ride the rising waters in Oliver’s wake? It’s unclear. 

This film was on the Black List (in 2020), meaning that it was relatively easy to find the screenplay. Matt is notably less evil in the final film, as the script that I found included him treating his grandmother much more coldly and cruelly, including getting her to pay for his flight back to the US after he gets stranded in London but ignoring her at the airport and taking an Uber (in the film she picks him up without incident). All that really remains of this in the final film is a brief scene in which he yells at her when she tries to talk to him while he’s on the phone with Oliver. There’s also an entire subplot about Oliver’s elderly neighbor, whom Matt (possibly accidentally) kills and then (definitely intentionally) moves into his garage so that he can continue to spy on Oliver’s group which is left out of the film. In the final release, the most violence that occurs is when Matt pushes Jamie off of a ladder (we see him later and, other than a broken nose, he’s fine) and when Oliver’s group beats Matty after they’ve finally had enough. It’s a choice that makes for a more interesting movie to make Matty less of an out and out serial killer and inject a bit more ambiguity, despite the fact that I went into this hoping to see just that kind of obsessive violence. Well worth it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond