Music

The new MUBI movie Lurker, from Beef and The Bear writer Alex Russell, explores the relationship between fan and artist from a very modern perspective. “I was interested in this aspect of music-making now where it’s so easy to make a song in your bedroom and upload it, and now you’re all of a sudden on the [artist] side of things,” Russell tells Consequence. “You could start out as a fan of something and then put out your own music — and all of a sudden you have fans.”

When that barrier between fan and artist decreases, it means that the relationship between those roles “starts to blur.” It’s a killer starting-off point for a film that tackles fandom and fame, which kicks off when the well-known musical artist Oliver (Archie Madekwe) drops by the shop where aspiring photographer Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) works. Matthew’s able to use that chance encounter to get closer to Oliver and his entourage — enjoying the perks that come from the rock star lifestyle. And when Oliver starts to pull away, Matthew knows he has to find a way to stay in his orbit… by any means necessary.

Russell makes his feature debut as both a writer and director with the film, after winning an Emmy as part of the Beef creative team and writing multiple episodes of The Bear (including Season 2’s extraordinary “Forks”). While Lurker is described in the official press materials as a “a cat-and-mouse thriller,” in watching it its genre feels a little bit nebulous, playing a bit funnier and a bit more grounded than you might expect.

Related Video

That’s something Russell says wasn’t necessarily planned. “I think it wasn’t as intentional as it was just what I wanted to see happen in the movie. And I really like how it worked out tonally. It feels very me, it feels very my style.”

As he continues, “I don’t think I’m able to write something that doesn’t have any comedic edge to it, and I don’t think I’m able to write anything that isn’t somewhat cynical and dark. So I think I was really just trying to be true to what I found interesting and funny. It has this structure of a common thriller, and we know some of those beats as they start to play out. But some of them will surprise you with a comedic turn.”

Lurker made its debut at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, prior to its theatrical debut courtesy of MUBI, and since then people have made their guesses as to who Russell’s inspiration was for Oliver. While he says that “I think everyone that anyone has guessed has been in the realm of intention,” there’s one star who Russell says isn’t a great comparison: “People have mentioned The Weeknd, and I’m like, no, he was so huge as an artist, so immediately. And so recognizable.”

Instead, he conceived of his fictional pop star as someone who’s “more in a DIY stage of his career. He’s small enough as an artist that he could have his friends doing his album artwork — sort of on that precipice where his production value is about to skyrocket.”

Depicting a musical artist at this turning point, he feels, might have been an unconscious reflection of the mindset he was in while originally working on the script in 2020, just after beginning his career as a television writer. “I felt like I was on the verge of doing what I wanted to do as a career when I wrote this movie,” he says. “Maybe that was what was going on in my mind.”

Russell says creating the original music for Oliver was the easiest part of making the movie, because “I didn’t have to do it myself,” he laughs. That was instead handled by producer Kenny Beats, a friend of Russell’s who “can just make a song of any genre very quickly.” He mentions bedroom pop as one of the closer genres he wanted to emulate, with some rock elements: “It was just kind of like, how can we make this feel like an artist that doesn’t exist, but could exist among those artists, you know? I kind of just let Kenny run with it.”

At the beginning of the soundtrack development process, Russell mentioned a few artists to Beats as potential inspiration, including Steve Lacy, Dijon, and Rex Orange County (the latter of whom Beats brought in to contribute to the soundtrack). But, he adds, at that point the character of Oliver was “still somewhat amorphous” — something that changed after Beats and Archie Madekwe collaborated on a few songs. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s his sound. That’s perfect.’ I had no notes and then we put [the songs] in the movie.”

Core to the idea of Lurker, in the end, is how the mystique that surrounds musical artists is a level of stardom with its own set of rules, well beyond the way things work for successful actors in Hollywood. “Actors have to be punctual, they have to be on time — they’re not going to put their sunglasses on and forget to come today,” Russell says. “But musicians can kind of be like, ‘I don’t care about any of this.’”

“And then,” he continues, “everyone still loves them.”

Lurker stalks into theaters on Friday, August 22nd. The movie will be available on MUBI at a later date.