Echo Chambers and Inciting Incidents: Aaron Harvey on his New Film 'Come With Me'

I’m anxious about the state of the world – be it socially, economically, politically, environmentally. I’m sure you are too.

Yet navigating these cultural, economic, and political anxieties has become its own feat as we face a never ending flow of discourse to engage with. Political radicalization feels ever-increasing, imposing fear onto all of us that someone we know could be one cult of personality away from engaging with extreme, violent rhetoric. It’s my opinion that as political instability – particularly, right-wing conservatism – continues to affect our access to jobs, healthcare, and social services, more and more of us will develop a disillusionment and distrust towards institutions initially designed to protect us. Mounting cuts to educational and environmental programming leave us resentful towards our government as they favour million dollar corporations over the needs of average citizens.

At this moment, you can find someone who will tell you exactly what you want to hear via social media, podcasting, radio, or film. What once existed in fringe groups has invaded mainstream media. Polarizing figures such as Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro parade around college campuses for YouTube views. Eric Cartman even became Charlie Kirk on South Park.

While filmmakers – like Louis Theroux in Inside the Manosphere (2026) – can now serve as the intermediary between the seedy world of men’s influencers and your offline friends and family, the damage has already been done. For this reason, I personally wonder if filmmaking can be a rapid enough medium to respond to the pace of contemporary political discourse. It’s pessimistic, I know – however, I’d like to believe that after seeing the rise and fall of figures like Alex Jones and Andrew Tate, we can understand the playbook used by these cult-of-personality radicals. As film remains in conversation with mainstream culture and new media, we can now usher in films influenced by the years of political polarization we’ve all experienced. 

Aaron Harvey’s Come With Me is a response to the political polarization plaguing the American psyche. The film is a tense drama following Simon Ward (Theo Rossi), an average American man who faces the perfect storm of personal dissatisfaction and interest in Dalton Kirby (Ron Perlman), a controversial radio host. Like many Americans, Simon is frustrated with his social and economic circumstances, and finds solace in a radio personality telling him exactly what he wants to hear. 

I spoke to Harvey about his filmic and cultural influences that shaped the film’s thesis, along with how his thoughts on viral political rhetoric inform his characters’ psyche. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alex Docherty: The ethos of FilmSlop is [to explore] how film fits into our lived experiences and how those influences came to be a part of the movie. Are there specific elements of Come With Me that feel personal, and how did that influence the making of the film?

Aaron Harvey: As far as this film goes and elements that felt personal – when we set out to make this movie, I was talking to my co-writer [Jonathan Croom] and I kept noticing articles that kept popping up. There's a lot of gun issues right now. There's a lot of people just going postal. It's hard for everybody out there, so sometimes people crack, I get it. But I would keep seeing these interviews or articles about either workplace shootings or school shootings, and a lot of times, especially the workplace shootings which tended to be older men -- where by and large, you would always have this sentiment after it happened, talking to [their] friends or family where they'd be like, “Oh my God, we had no idea he was going to do this.” And I was always fascinated by this viewpoint, where nobody had a clue that this dude was going to do that? Really? No one had any idea?  [These perpetrators] weren't so isolated that it wasn't like, “We haven't seen him in 10 years and all of a sudden he did this thing.” So that kind of kicked off this idea of, what if we did a movie about a guy that basically is going to go commit one of these horrible workplace shootings? But really, it's not about that. It's about how he got there. What's the bridge between a seemingly normal man that everybody says is totally fine, to “I'm going to go in and kill somebody”? That's a huge leap. And we were like, what is that? What does that mean? How did he get there?

Another big thing you see right now is these divisive Alex Jones-esque characters. The idea that you get media and information from everywhere – if you want to just filter it for your own worldview, or you want it to affirm whatever you think or believe, then it exists and it's out there. But the insidious stuff is where it's somebody who nobody has any idea that they're taking this stuff in and it's festering. That’s scary. And that’s where the radio host came in, played by Ron Perlman. We incorporated his narration into the film as almost our main character’s running inner monologue, which we also thought was a unique way of doing it. Instead of it being just his own thoughts, let’s make it part of the plot of the film itself. Dual purpose. We thought, let's write that movie. It was just interesting and appealing to us, and that's how the script started initially.

AD: Starting from the beginning of the film, your protagonist, Simon, is a normal guy until he’s the victim of a home invasion, which shakes him enough to fall deeper into the rhetoric from Dalton's show. I think this spoke to an anxiety that a lot of people are just sitting on the edge, waiting for an inciting incident to start a fall into radicalization. Can you speak more to the home invasion being Simon’s inciting incident? 

AH: We wanted it to be a situation where there wasn't anything that extreme that happened to him. Even what Dalton's saying to him is not overly extremist. It's just, “Hey, I'm posing these questions about what's going on in the world, but you, the listener -- you fill in the blank.” But he knows what he's doing. 

With the home invasion, it was something where Simon feels violated, but it’s also not anything other than a totally random event, and his wife is able to move on fairly quickly from it. 

Yeah, this sucks, but he uses that as the catalyst to fuel the mindset of  “See, I told you. Things are falling apart. There's lawlessness out there. There's no justice. The police are not doing anything about this.” It stirs the pot for him mentally to kind of create the seed that then grows into the plant that evolves. We purposely were trying to do something that was somewhat innocuous, that wasn't like, “Oh, I get it, his kid got killed, and so therefore, he's really pissed off.” We were like, no, let's make it just be something where nothing is really that bad or wrong and his life is really totally fine, and he's really in an okay spot compared to everybody else. But he still allows for this situation and then Dalton’s input to kind of take his brain over. 

AD: I think it's interesting, in regards to Simon's character, that everything in his life is mostly okay. I think with him, and a lot of people in real life who are attracted to these sorts of political personalities, is that they don’t start off with extremist views. They have the same universal anxieties about the current state of the world that most of us do. I really saw that in the scene where Simon goes into the radio station. He's talking about how he wants to reject a 9-to-5, and I thought, yeah he's become deranged, but I understand him to an extent. The same 9-to- 5 that my parents had is probably not going to let me buy a house and start a family. I can see how these anxieties can cause disillusionment. But I'm wondering if you have thoughts on this, perhaps on how some people fall into radicalization and violence from the same anxieties that a lot of us have?

AH: That's a good point. That is one thing we tried to do in the script, and then in the movie. Number one, [to] not make it be overly political in any direction, even though there's definitely those undertones and it's coming from a point of view. But also, not making it things that you couldn't necessarily agree with. Like, he's just bummed about X, Y or Z that's happening, or this guy's just calling out things he thinks he's seeing and so he thinks he's totally right or whatever. 

At least with Simon, we were like, let's just have it feel like it's a pile on. He's got all these things that keep happening to him, so he starts feeling intensely that the world is unfair or there's this injustice. Between what's happening at work and with his co-worker, he's getting glossed over for his promotion a lot, and then he's again hearing all the stuff from the radio host the whole time. So, it's the pile on of “The world is crushing down on me and there's no escape, and I don't know where to channel my aggression and my anger.” I think sometimes that's what happens in real life. It's a misguided sense of, I’m gonna get mine, correct some perceived injustice. You know, like the cause of my problems is this thing, this guy that I work with or this element in my life or whatever it is, and they just fixate. 

There's a lot of people dealing with the same stuff that don't get to that place. Some of us do. But at the same time, it's happening enough that it was interesting to just go like, what? What is that, that actually causes that sort of click over? We kind of thought, It's just a bunch of elemental things hitting this guy at one time, and him just getting kind of overwhelmed. Then the gasoline on the fire is the voice in his head telling him, ‘you know what, you're right, this shit is fucked up. That guy is your problem. Or like, you should be getting more and you're not and whatever’. We didn't want him to have a mental illness. We didn't want him to be like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, where he's actually like, sociopathic, which is fine in that movie and awesome. But we wanted our guy to be a normal, grounded human who just falls down the rabbit hole of susceptibility. 

AD: A question I have about Dalton is that he's a radio host. I may be coming from a very Gen Z perspective here, but I've seen a lot of these extremist political commentators coming up online or on podcasts, because there either wasn't a wide audience yet, or the subject matter wasn't something that you could put on mainstream radio or TV. By putting Dalton on the radio, is it a sign that this extreme rhetoric is coming into the mainstream, or was it more of a stylistic choice?

AH: I mean, it was a little stylistic. But, also, he's probably this guy who has a small FM local station, and he's more of a celebrity in his mind and in the region. It's not Howard Stern on the radio where everyone's listening to him, but he's got an audience. We thought about the podcast thing, but it felt a little too constrained. That's what everybody would do, is just make it a podcast. Then where's [Simon] going? To the guy's house to go for him at his computer? A lot of the elemental parts of it didn't feel like it made sense. Maybe because I am of the next generation, it’s a little more timeless, in a way, to have it be something where everybody still understands [radio]. Old generation, new generation, everybody. I mean, some of the boomers before me are getting more into podcasts, but people still click the radio or still listen, so we just thought it'd be interesting to see it. The station in the movie is a real station, there's real DJs on there all day long, talking, and they have audiences. This is just his little regional version of that. I'd imagine he has a little bit of a wider net than probably some of those other guys, because he's clearly influencing people in the area. It was kind of a mix of visual panache and actual story relevance.

AD: In making the film and writing Dalton's character, how familiar were you with these personalities? Did you listen to that sort of radicalizing content in the writing process, and what was it like just listening to that content?

AH: I'm definitely familiar with a lot of these guys, but it's mainly from seeing people on Facebook share stuff from them, most of it being clickbait or ragebait soundbytes. I was aware of them, and the cult of personality that got built around guys like Matt Walsh or whatever side of the coin it was -- and to be clear; both sides have them. But I didn't go crazy deep diving listening to them. I'd listened to a few, but we wanted to be a little bit more ambiguous. Let's just kind of create our own version of this composite and make him say the things we want him to say instead of leaning too heavily one [way] or the other. Even personally, I don't want to be too susceptible to one thing or another. It's nice to keep a little bit of an open mind and try to be rational and pick and choose what information you're ingesting. More so than being like, ‘this guy told me that the gays run Hollywood’ or whatever. You don't want to be that kind of person. But yeah, we listened to a little bit of it, but mainly created it off the cuff and came up with the personality, the dialogue and everything else.

AD: Dalton is an interesting figure, almost apolitical in a libertarian sort of way. A lot of talking points brought up by these figures are often incredibly sensationalist, whether it's trans people, seed oils, immigration, and whatnot. With Dalton and his show, all of that's avoided, except for a monologue on cancel culture via Bob Dylan. I'm wondering, why was that the one sensationalist talking point brought up? 

AH: What you just said at the beginning is true, apolitical is a good way to put it. He could be more libertarian. He's kind of in the middle, even if he clearly has a point of view. That's why it, to us, felt more dangerous. Again, he’s saying things that, if you took it a certain way, you could go, ‘that's kind of valid and I understand what he's getting at’. Even if the core of it is really not something that you personally jive with, or is a healthy thing per se.

With that [Dylan] bit, Dalton is an older guy and it's of his generation too, so it was an easy thing to point out when he was soapboxing. It was just part of his bigger rant in that one moment. He was riffing things off that he was coming across in the media at the time that he thought were ridiculous and for him it was, “This is a good thing I can use to point out how wrong X-issue is”. Show how Dylan was a scapegoat of sorts, again speaking to injustice, etc. So, we just put it in and it felt right for him to be saying that. I think if he was younger or [on a] podcast or whatever, it would have probably been a little bit of a different reference. I actually think when we were writing, there was something about Bob  in the media that popped up in real life, where he was getting cooked for something he did or said in the past, so we threw it in the script. But it was, for us, just part of this moment that Theo's listening to, and it's just a rant. It's not really [that] he was trying to make a bigger point about Dylan. There was no Easter egg there [or] some weird thing he was thinking for any reason.

AD: It's funny. He went on and on, and then was like, I don't even like Dylan anyways!

AH: Ha, yeah- that was pretty good.  He rants all about him to make his point, then throws it away, ha.

But yeah, it was just part of his “Here's why I'm riled up” rant. It's funny because, speaking of the libertarian contingent that I do tend to see, a lot of those people tend to get more angry about things in a way. Like, “I'm fired up about this thing that I believe, don’t tell me otherwise!” Versus the passive aggression on the two ends where it's “Oh, the Democrat morons, they don't know anything” or “Republicans are just sheeple who only do what their leader tells them to do”. The two hard ends of the spectrum tend to be more chilled out in a weird way about the way that they approach it -- it's real snarky and it's real passive. Which can be worse I suppose. But  again, the middle guys tend to be more like, “you know, no one's listening to me. Listen to what I'm saying, because this is the truth!” They get a little bit more riled.