You’d think that the wide world of sports would be tailor-made for the horror genre. Mental obsession, physical perfection, extreme competitiveness, towel whip injuries – all prime ingredients for stories blending athletic drive with terror, but the subgenre’s slim pickings don’t quite bear that out. Most examples lean towards comedy (Night of the Dribbler, Teen Wolf, Battlefield Baseball, Girls with Balls) while only a handful take a serious approach to the pairing (Fatal Games, Blood Games, Him).
Tennis, a sport that doesn’t seem to get many movies about it in general, has finally landed its first crossover with the horror genre. Bloody Tennis falls mostly on the serious side of the genre net, for better and worse, resulting in an uneven matchup between sports thrills and horror chills.
Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is a young American with aspirations of winning some majors and becoming the world number one. She’s been sent to an esteemed but remote tennis academy in rural Spain to learn from a legendary pairing – Mary Tyrone (Elina Lowensohn) is the owner/motivator, and Stavkos (Zlatko Buric) is the coach – who guarantee results for students who give the training their all. Five other girls are already in play when Sophie arrives, and she quickly discovers that she’s only here because another girl left early.
The film’s cold open shows a girl being pummeled and killed on the court by a powerful ball machine with precision aim, so we already know she didn’t leave early of her own accord.
Training commences immediately, and Sophie’s not thrilled to see that it’s harsh, unfair, and heavy in hairy proteins. She knows she has to stick it out, though, and when a knock-out tournament is announced between the six students with an incredible end prize, she decides that nothing and no one is going to stand in her way.
Writer/director Nikias Chryssos paints a vivid picture with Bloody Tennis regarding a young athlete’s all or nothing drive to be the best, and he puts style on a higher pedestal than substance throughout. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the film’s “’70s eurohorror” vibes are certain to remind viewers of other films that have done the same. Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Phenomena, for example, both drop young American women into foreign academies with weirdly incoherent atmospheres, but Chryssos lacks Argento’s grip on the unfolding madness.
To be sure, he still nails more than a few moments of horror through imagery both beautiful and grotesque, and it works to unsettle and, on occasion, disgust. Bloody smoothies, writhing slugs and leeches, and bodily injuries captured in wince-inducing detail – a hidden tack stabbing into a toe is very effective – all feed into the idea that pain and suffering are necessary to be a winner. That suffering is required by both you and your opponents, and if you can tilt the scale so that they get the bulk of it? Well, that’s game, set, match.
As someone who only watches and plays a single sport, tennis, I’m always thrilled to see it captured in the movies, but it’s clear that Chryssos could have just as easily made this about pickleball or even water polo. Details of the sport never come into play outside of some gnarly scenes featuring the camp’s creepy handyman, Fred (Vincent Romeo), acquiring and stringing the racquets with “catgut.” In real life, people used sheep, goat, or other farm animal intestines to string with, but Fred takes the term more literally… and then goes another step or two beyond that.
Chryssos and cinematographer Constantin Campean also shoot the tennis sequences with an eye for style and beauty rather than authenticity. We get a few wide shots, but most matches are captured in close-up to highlight the sweat, pain, and inner violence that these teenagers are willingly enduring in their effort to be the best. It’s a highly effective choice given Chryssos’ focus here, even if it makes his choice of sport inconsequential.
Kampp does good work as Sophie and captures both the innocence she arrives with and the aggression she begins to develop. Her Danish accent occasionally slips through to remind you she’s not actually from Detroit, but it’s hardly a real distraction. The remaining young women are something of a mixed bag, performance-wise, but in their defense, there’s not much to the characters aside from the expected type-A personalities. Tracy Goteas’ Bana is an exception, though, as we see a more distinct line between Bana’s on and off-court personas. She and Sophie also share a striking transition shot as Chryssos moves us from a close-up of leeches to one of the girls biting the other’s bare back.
Bloody Tennis more than lives up to the first half of its clunky title, and while CG blood is nobody’s friend, there are enough practical gore beats to satisfy. I’d actually argue there are too many instances, though, as the body count really shouldn’t be as high as it is here. No spoilers, but Chryssos throws logic out the window in favor of delivering more kills when they’re just not necessary.
The film’s at its best when focused on Sophie’s growing understanding of the world around her. The academy’s atmosphere is heightened, obviously, but its real-world ramifications on the cut-throat nature of not just survival, but domination, are evident. A disconnected father, a deceased mother who was a former professional player, the idea that this is her only shot at becoming someone – these are fuel for her fire, and the strength here is seeing what she chooses to do with those accelerants.
Chryssos, who made his feature debut with 2015’s weird and wonderfully awkward Der Bunker, crafts an attractive and intriguing world with Bloody Tennis. A tighter focus on those inner workings would make for a more lasting and effective film, but as it stands, this is still an entertaining and icky entry in the sport horror subgenre. And really, parents need to stop sending their daughters to remote European schools…
Bloody Tennis makes its debut on Shudder today, September 25.
