BLOODY TENNIS

Tennis has somehow become the coolest sport among all my friends in France. Sophie has a rather different experience. Sent to a summer academy in Southern Europe to hone her skills—skills the director is not convinced she even possesses—she enters a SUSPIRIA-inspired world where something feels wrong from the start. Every morning, the students must swallow a strange-smelling, gooey, chunky, blood-red smoothie. Cats are disappearing. Her roommate keeps her medication hidden inside a teddy bear. And as Sophie forms relationships with the women around her through friendship, rivalry, and desire, we come to understand that this will be a very bloody, very strange, sporting coming-of-age story.

The deeper Sophie gets, the more extreme the academy’s methods become. Leeches are used to improve performance, and a deeply unsettling assistant may know something about those missing cats. He is certainly the reason I found myself googling, “What is catgut actually made of?” I will let you discover the answer to that one on your own. But the strangeness never sidelines the sport: Sophie begins proving the director wrong, and the more she succeeds, the more power the academy gains over her.

Nikias Chryssos pushes familiar ideas about discipline, sacrifice, and competitive excellence into grotesque territory, turning the academy into a satire of performance culture itself: a world where every body must be optimized, every weakness corrected, and almost any damage can be reframed as commitment if it produces a winner. Hello, modern world. But the satire lands because Sophie genuinely wants what the academy is offering. The better she becomes, the more willing she is to accept its logic, and the price is paid through the people around her. With its sun-washed whites, eruptions of blood-red, and queasy humor, BLOODY TENNIS is as visually playful as it is unexpectedly emotional. Now, I have only been to Roland-Garros once, but I am fairly certain this is not how tennis academies normally operate. (SONIA DROULHIOLE)

*Paired with the short BY YOURSELF dir. Elaine Frost

Zelda Adams (HELLBENDER) stars as a woman intent on camping alone, only to discover another tent that wasn’t there the night before.