2025 was a major year for filmmaker Alex Russell. He made his feature debut as a screenwriter and director with Lurker, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie made other festival stops, most notably at Berlin and San Sebastián, and even saw a limited theatrical release last summer, thanks to MUBI and Focus Features, both of whom acquired U.S. and international distribution rights (respectively).
“That actual first premiere [at Sundance] was such a blur for me because I was just so lost in the experience,” Russell says in our Zoom interview.
We meet almost exactly one year after Lurker played for its very first audience, and the filmmaker admits to being more reflective lately on the screening: “I remember being there and being like, ‘Okay, they laughed at that — great!’ or ‘Oh, the people are leaning in.’ I’ve never had that experience before because I come from working on TV, where you never really get [a] real-time feeling of the audience hanging onto what’s happening on-screen.”
Russell began his television career in 2020 as a staff writer (and, later, story editor) for FX’s Dave. Shortly afterwards, in 2023, he worked in the writers room and as supervising producer for the first season of Netflix’s Emmy-winning Beef. That same year, Russell was a writer and supervising / consulting producer on another Emmy-winning series, The Bear. (His episode on the second season of the FX series, “Forks,” would go on to be one of the most acclaimed.)
If one can draw a line connecting his work on the small screen to Lurker, it would be about the inherent contradictions that exist between people and their everyday themes and circumstances, and, as a result, the tensions that arise because of them.
“Tension, I understand,” says Russell. “I know how to do that. I know how to write a scene about two people who have something unspoken between them — and that’s what I love most. That’s what I like to watch, too.”
“Tense” is indeed a perfect way to describe Lurker. A psychological thriller, Québec-born Théodore Pellerin stars as Matthew, a retail worker who worms his way into the entourage of rising music star Oliver, played by Archie Madekwe. Oliver’s inner circle is hesitant to trust Matthew at first, but he eventually wins them — and, more importantly, Oliver — over with his creative ideas on the visual elements of the artist’s upcoming album. It’s a dream come true for Matthew when Oliver brings him on as a photographer and documentarian.
On a thematic level, Lurker dives into the contradiction between access and boundaries. When Matthew’s prominence in and proximity to Oliver’s world is threatened, he goes to extreme lengths to maintain it. Violence and blackmail forge two paths Matthew walks down as he and Oliver engage in a creeping power struggle.
Russell explores contradiction on a formal level as well, opting to shoot on 16mm film. “The theory was, ‘Let’s go traditional in shooting on film,’” Russell explains. “[And then,] let’s let these hyper-specific, modern instances of screens and aux cords sit in that and see how it feels.”
When Russell initially wrote Lurker, he didn’t necessarily set out to be the film’s director as well. That decision, he says, was a nudge from the producers who felt that he best understood “the specificities of it, tonally and story-wise.”
“I think if we had given it to someone else to do [on] the same budget, there would have been certain things that got lost in translation — and, really, so much of directing turned out to be translation,” reflects Russell.
“So much of it was corralling people and evaluating people’s understanding of the script,” Russell says of his directing experience. “The script ended up being so much more important and [so much] less important than I thought, in a way. It’s so much more important as a hiring document; it’s the one thing that you have going into a thing that doesn’t exist yet, where everyone can look at it [and make sense of it]. If you all agreed on what that is, then you can go shoot something on the day that is totally different. [You can] throw the pages out if you have to because you’ve already gotten all these people to agree on what the movie is based on the original document.”
This awards season, both Russell and Lurker have earned a string of notable nominations. The Directors Guild of America nominated Russell for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in First-Time Theatrical Film. Meanwhile, Lurker scored four Film Independent Spirit Awards nominations: Best First Feature; Best First Screenplay (for Russell); Best Lead Performance (for Pellerin); and Best Supporting Performance (for Madekwe).
Though promoting and talking about a film for an entire year might, for some, sound repetitive or even tiring, Russell remains as excited to share his movie with audiences now as he was last January at Sundance. The film’s praise, he professes, has given him a confidence boost as a director. It comes at a perfect time as he is in the middle of writing something new.
“I like it when people bring up details because it brings me back there. It was actually such a joyful experience shooting this movie. I somehow know that all I’m going to have at the end of all this in several years is a fond memory of making it,” Russell shares. “I don’t know what I’ll be allowed to do in the future, but, truly, the best feeling is when you’re getting a scene up on its feet and you know that it’s clicking and you know that it’s working.”
The 41st Independent Spirit Awards will stream live on Film Independent’s YouTube channel on February 15 at 5:00pm EST. Lurker is now streaming on MUBI.
