We’re in the worst timeline in the Bad Place altiverse, and welcome to the hot new film subgenre: sports horror. Can our fucked-up culture take a brand of story that has long been inspirational and spin it so your blood runs cold? Absolutely! But hey, all that uplifting shit has probably been but a faux-cheerful veneer on a dark underbelly, et cetera, et cetera, right? What better time than right now, when all our institutions and traditions are falling apart, to pull the Band-Aid off and expose the dark reality beneath.
So, coincidental with football psycho-nightmare Him, from Jordan “Get Out” Peele’s production company — just out in US cinemas and opening in the UK on October 3rd — herewith British indie The Cut, from director Sean Ellis (Metro Manila, Anthropoid) and screenwriters Justin Bull and Mark Lane. This is very grim and as far as possible from the scrappy-underdog-makes-a-comeback stuff we usually expect from this sort of movie, and which it might appear to be at first. Yikes.
Orlando Bloom (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies), more intense than we’ve seen him before (yes, even more than Legolas), is an unnamed Irish boxer who washed out of his title shot 10 years ago, but now has a chance to make up for that. Sure, it’s in a stunt bout in Vegas for kinda-dodgy promoter Donny (Gary Beadle: In the Heart of the Sea), one of those YouTube-influencer–versus–actual-athlete events designed mostly for lulz and pay-per-view profit. Our sorry protagonist has a last-minute opening now because one of the fighters on the original card has killed the other in a preliminary — I can’t recall from the film whether the asshole YouTuber killed the pro or the other way around, but it really has no impact on the cynical reality of the scenario — and Donny needs a fill-in, pronto.
And that means that in order to hit the superwelterweight requirement for the match, our boxer needs to lose 26 pounds in six days, from an already pretty lean frame. Which is ridiculous. His partner, in business — they run a boxing gym together — and in life, Caitlin (the fabulous Caitríona Balfe: Ford v Ferrari, Escape Plan), is appalled, and she’s no innocent: her father was a legendary trainer, and she is our boxer’s trainer now; she knows what goes on to get a fighter into the ring. She agrees only because he is so insistent that he get his one last shot.
This is a real thing in boxing, it seems: dangerously fast weight cutting that often veers into methods not only banned by the rules of the sport (so don’t get caught) but potentially lethally stupid. Apparently this is the first movie that delves deeply into this aspect of boxing, which is often treated, if it is at all, as a blink-and-you-miss-it part of the now-trite training montage.
To be clear, there is almost no actual boxing in The Cut. There is just the Boxer eating and purging — not even bingeing, merely snarfing a tiny hors d’oeuvre or a small candy bar after days of nothing but a bite of chicken or a some egg whites, then sticking a couple of fingers down his throat to barf it up. There is just the Boxer sweating it out in a sauna and having the essential hydrating liquid of his mortal body being scraped from his skin by a credit card. There is only… well, some other deeply humiliating, even shocking things the Boxer does in his attempt to make weight. It’s all goaded on by unethical trainer Boz (John Turturro: The Batman, Gloria Bell), who steps in as the desperation mounts and time is getting even shorter; he makes it clear that he does not give the tiniest shit about the Boxer’s health or well being, only about earning his fee and hitting that number on the scale.
This is body horror the likes of which we have not seen before, not only in the unseen-side-of-a-sport aspect but in men’s mental health, particularly as it relates to men’s eating disorders and outright abuse of their own bodies. (It’s a thing our culture doesn’t talk about, and arguably it is an unspoken subtext of many of those “inspirational” sports movies.) Bloom is incredibly dedicated to the character: he lost, reportedly, between 30 and 50 pounds for the role, and it’s not like he was overweight to begin with, but more vitally, he seems to have taken on an understanding of how such a drastic physical transformation is so short a time can alter the brain. The actor has spoken about how completely out of it he was at his lowest weight, barely able to function. The film was shot in reverse order, so that production started with him at his most gaunt, most depleted, which allowed the actor to build back his health as they continued. And gaunt he is: as the Boxer, Bloom looks so awful onscreen that you wonder how his character is meant to be able to perform in a professional athletic event after all this.
Oh, is winning all in your mind? That motivational cliché of the genre gets a twist here, one that’s both nasty and poignant: What if your mind is actually a total mess? This is a nightmare of a sports movie that faces head on damaging notions of masculinity and men’s ways of coping (or not) with emotional and psychological pain that too often pass unacknowledged onscreen.
more films like this:
• The Machinist [Prime US | Apple TV US | Sky Cinema UK]
• Rocky Balboa [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
