An American prodigy joins an insular, creepy European academy with secrets in Nikias Chryssos’s underwhelming and derivative Bloody Tennis, now on Shudder.
Hey, you. Do you feel like watching Suspiria but care to swap dance for tennis and cut out all the tension and interest? Well, do I have the movie for you! Bloody Tennis, from writer-director Nikias Chryssos, now streaming on Shudder, is a disappointing misfire. The sort of “man, this doesn’t work” where anything that might make a moment is continually overshadowed by the more well-known work (or works with Luca Guadagnino’s incredible 2018 remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 classic).
Sandra Guldberg Kampp of Foundation is Sophie, an American tennis sensation who heads to a secluded European specialty school to join a tough program. She’s late for whatever reason, coming the day after another student is murdered (cough!… sorry, this murder is nowhere near as cool as the source’s). There, she joins a group of a half-dozen other phenoms from around the world in the program, led by the enigmatically strange, witchy pair of instructors and their odd bowl-cut-bearing assistant. I honestly loved this “family”. Mary is played by Elina Lowensohn, and she’s deliciously and compellingly off-kilter; oozing menace. She is wonderful, straight out of an Italian supernatural horror movie. The male instructor is Zlatko Buric’s Stavkos. Between Triangle of Sadness, Superman, the underappreciated one-season Wonderman, and here, he’s shown to be highly entertaining and delectable with his over-the-top antics. A new favorite character actor. The bad haircut-bearing assistant Fred is compellingly off in how he plays his awkward bits; Vincent Romero adds appropriate creepiness.
It’s too bad there’s nothing to hang onto outside the trio running the camp, with the actual lead and her troubles coming out rather middle of the road. For something clearly attempting to play a match with a genre high-water mark, it misses every shot. The sequences, whether tennis, suspense-based, or connecting the girls, come off flat and uninspired. As a lead, Kampp is bland and barely covers her accent (she’s Danish, playing American), and the other girls have little to hold onto; all playing the same sort of A-type drive, putting what’s lacking elsewhere in their life into the sport. Their ups and downs, connections, and fights barely make it past the net of gripping storytelling. The lesbian romance between Sophie and fellow student Bana comes from nowhere and doesn’t add anything; it almost seems half-assed to try to grab onto some sort of extra juice. Most of the film is blandly presented and devoid of any building atmosphere. Hell, tennis is a high-velocity sport, active and moving. Bloody Tennis makes it all look boring, compared to another Guadagnino film in Challengers (which I didn’t even like) or table tennis in Marty Supreme. I get both had bigger budgets and resources, but even on a cat-string budget (heh), you can do more to make it watchable.
Because I’m not a total grouch, there are some things I did like! It has some gruesome reasons for it all, a few well-done gore sequences, and at least one effective scare sequence. Some aspects of the location designs scream 70s eurohorror, with solid production design when it feels like it and shots to match, but it’s not enough to add up to something special or even passing. Despite my comparisons, it’s not 1:1 for Suspiria, and the deviations are welcome and interesting at times.
Sadly, Bloody Tennis underserves. Removing the obvious connections, something in the mix could speak to the power drive of needing to succeed in these young women, and translate into the horror on screen. Or how this is their one outlet in a world where their parents are distant and uncaring (as seen often across the characters, blurring them). But it’s lost under the weight of Suspira and pretty empty when that weight is lifted. Writer-director Nikias Chryssos’s Bloody Tennis is an underwhelming, mostly uninteresting film that, while it has some solid moments, loses the match by hewing too close to a pair of bona fide classics.