Director: Nikias Chryssos
Stars: Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Tracy Gotoas, Vincent Romeo
At the exclusive Mary Tyronne Tennis Academy located out in some unspecified Southern European badlands, matches are played on blood red tennis courts, cell phones are confiscated (of course), and rackets are tailor made on the premises by Igor-like dogsbody Fred (Vincent Romeo), strung from the intestines of kittens. Six success-hungry wannabes compete against each other at the sadistic behest of Mary herself (Elina Löwensohn), weened on dubious meals of red meat combined with the least appetising smoothies you’ve ever seen. It’s hard to miss the inference of cannibalism as the competitors are whittled down, nor by extension the metaphor for toxic competitiveness being peddled by up and coming filmmaker Nikias Chryssos. Bloody Tennis (truly a great name) isn’t so much horror’s answer to Challengers (there’s really not that much tennis played), as it is a European companion to Justin Tipping’s sports horror misfire HIM. Chryssos’ film is more consistently engaging, but it still winds up making a set of heavy-handed moves to arrive at a similar place.
In a move that echoes the oft-imitated genre staple Suspiria, Bloody Tennis forefronts an American ingenue and stranger in a strange land. Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is the proverbial lamb to the slaughter, having secured a place at Mary’s prestigious academy following the disappearance of former student Erin. She settles in with her international peers, not blind to the quirks of Mary’s intimately-scaled regime. But while she befriends pill-popping Heidi (Helena Zengel) and starts a sexually heated tryst with Bala (Tracy Gotoas), the extent of Sophie’s competitiveness is kept closely guarded. We know her mother was a great tennis player before her and the legacy pressures that entails, and that her father is now a widower, but gauging how far the young American is prepared to stoop is kept at bay by the film’s numerous bloody and ridiculous distractions (exhibit A; the creepy, toady visage of Zlatko Burić as leering umpire Stavkos).
Confronted with one of Igor’s vile cat-spun rackets, Sophie is confronted with a clear challenge to her personal ethics in pursuit of professional excellence. Her swift adaptation in this regard is one of the few indicators of the killer instinct hidden beneath her mostly passive veneer. Guldberg Kampp plays her a little cagily, most fervently passionate not on the tennis courts, but in her sweaty clinches with Bala. Perhaps because of this, Sophie’s erupting ruthlessness in her final match, pitted against unscrupulous Brit Nelly (French find Lily Taïeb), doesn’t feel particularly well earned or charted. Having dawdled somewhat, Chryssos also ups the ante with comic intensity. The injuries sustained in this sequence unfortunately play as simply ridiculous.
The rest of the younger cast acquit themselves adequately in roles that mainly tilt toward the expected, evoking the cattiness of sororities, dormitories and, of course, locker rooms. The three staff members lean luridly into the camp, skewing any sense of seriousness out of the picture, furthered by the eccentricities of their appearance. Hair and costuming proffer the reassurance that this is deliberate. Bloody Tennis approaches horror in these terms, striving for kook over creeps with some occasional gory splatter. In Chryssos’ depiction of the merciless world of competitive sports, one truly doesn’t want to know how the sausage is made.
“Grow, win, transcend” is the mantra Mary imparts to her faithful cadets. To borrow from the sport’s parlance, Bloody Tennis achieves a tentative deuce. While aesthetically coherent, Chryssos hasn’t managed to transform the nominal sports horror subgenre into anything new, having merely applied the leeches to works that have gone before him. That said, there’s enough promise here to keep his name on the radar. If he hasn’t wholly won out this time, growth and transcendence may be worth looking out for down the road.
