Inside Lurker with filmmaker Alex Russell: Power and the Cost of Belonging

Watch the full conversation in the video below:

With Lurker, writer-director Alex Russell delivers an unsettling portrait of ambition, intimacy, and control within Los Angeles’ music scene. What begins as a story about creative proximity slowly transforms into something far more disturbing, a meditation on performance both artistic and emotional and the quiet violence of power imbalances.

Russell unpacks` the origins of the film, the shifting subjectivity at its core, and how lived experience in the music industry shaped Lurker’s unnerving realism.

Russell originally set out to tell a story about being a young man in his twenties, immersed in LA’s music scene. The breakthrough came when he reframed the narrative through a specific lens of what if the audience experienced this world through someone who was always on the outside, desperately trying to stay in?

That “observer” perspective became essential not just structurally, but thematically. As Russell explains, many of his favorite films begin with a character entering a new environment, allowing the audience to learn the rules alongside them. He cites touchstones like Mean Girls and The Sandlot, where social hierarchies and power dynamics are revealed through adaptation.

In Lurker, that device is complicated by control. The film is often anchored to the character with the least power in a given scene and that power is constantly shifting.

Midway through the film, Russell made a pivotal creative decision: to begin ending scenes from Oliver’s emotional perspective rather than Matthew’s. As control changes hands, so does the film’s subjectivity.

The result is a tonal pivot that feels almost like a grounded horror film. Russell wanted the audience to feel the “aching presence” of Matthew even when he isn’t on screen.

Crucially, Russell resisted exaggeration. Rather than portraying Matthew as a caricature or villain, he directed the performance toward unsettling normalcy. The most frightening thing, he suggests, is not overt madness but instead the insistence that everything is fine, even when a line has been crossed.

Russell hopes audiences lean in. On the surface, Lurker can look like a story about a guy trying too hard to be cool. But beneath that is a dense web of longing, manipulation, fear, and desire for recognition.

“The closer people look,” he says, “the better.”

Q&A on the film Lurker with writer & director Alex Russell. Moderated by Mara Webster.