THE STORY – Five ballerinas, stranded in a remote forest, take shelter at an unsettling roadside inn. They must weaponize years of brutal training, turning grace, discipline, and even pointe shoes into tools for survival.
THE CAST – Iris Apatow, Lana Condor, Millicent Simmonds, Avantika, Maddie Ziegler & Uma Thurman
THE TEAM – Vicky Jewson (Director) & Kate Freund (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 88 Minutes
Considering how often we talk about action choreography, it’s a bit of a wonder that no one has built an action film around dancers until now. It’s a perfect fit: Dancers are already extremely physical, possessing tremendous power and flexibility in their bodies. They move swiftly and precisely, and they endure as much pain and suffering in their careers as stunt people. The kineticism of dance and stunt work is so similar as to be almost exactly the same. With “Pretty Lethal,” screenwriter Kate Freund and director Vicky Jewson show that they understand this to a higher degree than anyone has before. Designed with ballet as its driving force, “Pretty Lethal” hits just as hard as any other 87North production, with clever, kinetic action sequences that feel all the more thrilling for how they decontextualize the art of ballet.
Ballerinas Bones (Maddie Ziegler), Princess (Lana Condor), Grace (Avantika), Chloe (Iris Apatow), and Zoe (Millicent Simmonds) have reached a pinnacle of their young careers: They have been invited to dance at an elite showcase in Budapest with the best young dancers in the world. After a delayed, rerouted flight loses their luggage, their bus breaks down, causing the girls and their teacher, Miss Thorna (Lydia Leonard), to walk to the nearest town. They find the Teremok Inn, run by Devora (Uma Thurman), a former ballerina who decades ago suffered a terrible injury that ended her promising career. What the girls don’t know is that Devora is tied up with the mob. When the local mob boss’s son shoots Miss Thorna in the back in front of the girls after she rejects his advances, they instantly become a liability. If they want to survive, the girls will need every bit of training they have, as well as every tool in their dance bags.
In many ways, “Pretty Lethal” is exactly what you’d expect from a film with this logline; the girls, each defined by a single personality trait, try to escape the Inn, find themselves cornered, and have to dance their way out, sometimes using just their impressive high kicks, sometimes adding weapons like hammers or scissors. This results in some incredibly fun fight scenes, with the girls managing some impressive maneuvers (especially after a razor blade gets stuck in the wooden box of Bones’s pointe shoe, turning her leg into a lethal weapon) set to music from “The Nutcracker.” As talented as they are, though, the film doesn’t treat them as invincible action heroes. They’re still young women going up against men twice their size or more, and their bodies are breakable. The punishing sound mix makes you wince every time their bodies hit the (concrete) floors of the Inn. The increasing amount of blood staining their white leotards drives this home; these girls are fighting for their lives in an impossibly dangerous situation, and they need to put in superhuman effort to have a chance of making it out alive.
Thankfully, ballerinas basically are superhuman, and the actresses playing them here are, too. Simmonds is especially endearing as the sweet Zoe falls for Artyom (Krisztián Csákvári), one of Devora’s sons, who offers to give her a tattoo. She benefits from stronger sound work that puts us directly into her hard-of-hearing point of view, which now feels almost like a gimmick that follows her from film to film ever since “A Quiet Place.” Still, she plays both the comedy and horror of those moments so well that it’s forgivable. While all the girls share a sisterly bond, Apatow and Simmonds work together to ensure their relationship as actual sisters feels distinct from the rest of the group, resulting in a dynamic that feels more intimate. Avantika and Condor have the most comic roles, and they sink their teeth into them with abandon. After the religious Grace gets drugged by their captors, Avantika gives a performance of inspired loopiness, while Condor revels in Princess’s rich-bitch persona, delivering her cutting dialogue with razor-sharp line readings.
Ziegler’s the lead, though, and while it may be unsurprising given how much the role feels tailor-made for her, she nails it. The erstwhile “Dance Moms” phenom has been steadily maturing as a performer over the past few years, and the role of the working-class Bones (the bad girl of the group) fits her like a glove. The feral fire in her eyes as Bones stabs one of their captors with abandon confirms that she’s finally matured into a full-on movie star, an incredibly talented everygirl who can ace every test thrown at her. This isn’t the kind of movie that’s usually big on genuine emotion, but when her dance career is threatened, Ziegler taps into a deep well of desperation that feels genuinely heartrending. She comes into her own as the leader of the ensemble right alongside her character, a beautiful thing to see.
As the haughty, ruthless Devora, Thurman swans through the film with grande dame energy. She sees her younger self in the girls, leading to some heartfelt moments between them, but she will sacrifice them to get what she wants. The real genius of the character is in how the design of the Teremok Inn expresses her character. The Inn is a marvel of production design, with a typically Eastern European-looking cabaret-style lobby, hallways draped in red velvet, and a museum’s worth of memorabilia from Devora’s career. The location isn’t so much a character in and of itself as it is a pure expression of one, and it’s quite an eye-popping one at that.
Jewson directs the film with flair, most notably in the action sequences. The patented 87North bisexual lighting feels like a trope at this point, but it looks good, and Bridger Nielson’s camera knows just when to move to maximize the impact of the fight choreography. Editor Richard Smither cuts to the beat of the music beautifully, making ballet beautifully brutal. Yes, the characters are one-note, yes, some of the dialogue is cringeworthy. But you don’t watch a movie like this for character or dialogue, you watch it to see fierce, strong young women twirl, kick, and stab their way through a pack of mobsters to the sound of Tchaikovsky. On that front, “Pretty Lethal” delivers. Brava, ladies!
