LENORE (2026)

3 stars

Seven Tales. Digital. 21st September.

Veronica Brand (Ruby Duncan) goes by the name of Lenore, and is a controversial online content creator with a large following for her outrageous videos.

Max Wren (Nicholas Jacquinot), a nervy, often agitated, sickly looking young man is obsessed with her. He claims to be a filmmaker and is making a documentary about his obesssion, spending most of his time in the basement of his house, which is filled with professional video equipment like mixers and the like and a lot of monitors, where he repeatedly watches feeds of his infatuation.

He seems desperate to compare himself to her and claims things in common – speaking to her image on the screen or reaching out to her as LoneWolf91.

But then there is a YouTube post saying this contentious ’celebrity’ has been unusually silent and everything relating to her has disappeared from the internet – website, socials… everything and she has disappeared. This is following a video that had the TV show Play School intercut with footage of her miscarriage in the bath!

Did Max have something to do with what has happened? Freaky things start to occur around him…

This is a somewhat bleak but effective study of a man sliding into madness. With character names “borrowed” from Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME, this also mixes in a touch of Edgar Allan Poe (even explicitly naming him at one point), with Lenore being a poem by the famous author. This is scarily relevant for today – with a portrait of how online life can takeover a person. This is setup as a mystery as to what happened to the provocative influencer but is really about how obsession can tip into insanity. Jacquinot is excellent as the shy yet potentially dangerous videographer and director David Ward makes good use of the limited location.

Steve Kirkham