Lenore is currently screening at part of the Chattanooga Film Festival virtual line up.
Having watched my fair share of youtube deepdives dissecting the rise and fall of once prominent influencers, usually by their own undoing, Lenore immediately had my attention. Its hook is irresistible: when a controversial internet personality suddenly disappears, a terminally online superfan becomes consumed with uncovering the truth, only to find himself confronting the uglier realities of his own past.
As if that premise weren’t compelling enough, the film weaves in the works of Edgar Allan Poe directly into its DNA. It’s a bold creative gamble that could have easily come across as gimmicky, but instead here is flawlessly executed takedown of our parasocial culture.
The film begins with Max Wren (Nicholas Jaquinot) as our simp in a basement, who claims he is working on a documentary on Lenore (Ruby Duncan), an influencer turned musician, turned visual artist who disappeared from the public eye after a video of her miscarrying was cut into the live broadcast of a children’s show. Max is obviously mentally unstable, living in filth and scribbling in notebooks his abstract nonsensical observations. But It’s through Max’s “research” that we are drip fed Lenore’s story, which begins to shine a light on influencer culture in a way rarely tackled on screen.
In true Edgar Allan Poe fashion, Max is haunted and tormented by his obsession, and it quickly becomes clear that something far more sinister than a simple disappearance is at play. But Lenore is at its strongest when it turns that mystery inward, offering a sharp deconstruction of parasocial relationships and the emotional wreckage they can leave behind. It’s an unflinching look at the dangers of mistaking curated personas for genuine intimacy—a reminder that no matter how invested we become, these people don’t belong to us.
The film pushes that critique even further by examining how those dynamics are intensified when the subject is a woman, exposing the objectification and commodification that so often accompany female visibility online and the entitlement it can foster in the awkward male audiences.
Lenore is a terrifying portrait of a very real corner of online culture, capturing the toxic obsessions and warped sense of ownership that can take root in parasocial spaces with unsettling accuracy. By filtering these modern anxieties through the gothic sensibilities of Edgar Allan Poe—a writer whose work was so often consumed by obsession and fixation—the film elevates a clever premise into a haunting exploration of our contemporary loneliness epidemic. As someone who is chronically online myself Lenore is not that far fetched and that is exactly what is so terrifying about it.
