As I left the London Film Festival screening of Christy, I heard a stunned young woman telling her friend that this is a horror movie. And it is, of the most ordinary kind. It is also a biopic of sporting triumph about the importance of getting up every single time you’re knocked down. It’s the kind of movie women can use as a mirror but also the very rare movie that will make men briefly reflect about the world from a woman’s perspective. In all senses it is a rare and valuable – if sometimes a depressingly nasty – thrill ride. Christy hits you, and feels like a kiss.
In the mid-80s Christy Salters (Sydney Sweeney) has just finished school but still lives in rural West Virginia with her parents, miner John (Ethan Embry) and housewife Joyce (Merritt Wever), despite neither of them liking her very much. It’s rumored (accurately) that Christy is a lesbian, which deeply angers Joyce, and instead of getting a normal job, Christy made a couple hundred bucks in an exhibition boxing match. She agreed to do it for a joke, and was surprised that earning the money came so easily to her. Thanks to that fight she’s offered a semi-serious position boxing as pre-race entertainment at a Tennessee dirt track, and thanks to that job she’s offered sessions with a decent if small-time trainer named Jim Martin (Ben Foster, whose own boxing movie The Survivor has unfairly vanished without trace). The significantly older Jim is completely uninterested in training a woman even though he’s impressed by her raw fighting skill, but Joyce encourages Christy to ignore her own instincts and work with him anyway. It’s true that his coaching provides by far the best career opportunity she’s ever been offered, and it’s true she needs someone to help her navigate this masculine world of handshake agreements and opportunities based on who you know. On her own Christy doesn’t know anybody. But pretty soon she starts to learn a thing or two.
It becomes apparent that Christy’s dilemma is twofold. She loves her parents and is desperate for them to love her back, and she’s discovered she’s very good at a sport that traditionally has no room for women, much less gay women. So in order to be accepted by the wider boxing community, she must fight in pink silks, keep her hair long and talk about cooking. In order to be accepted by her family, she must play straight and put herself under a man’s thumb. The ways in which Christy repeatedly and through tears tries to confide in Joyce, only for Joyce to refuse to listen, is very hard and painful to watch. Ms. Wever gives a beautifully ugly performance as a mother – well known to the LGBTQ+ community of a certain age – who will sacrifice her actual daughter to maintain her own idea of herself. As Christy comes to submit to Jim’s involvement and then control of every area of her life, she does this because she’s afraid that if she loses him that she’ll lose both her sport and her family. The fact Jim lies, withholds money, blackmails her sexually and worse, in every possible way abuses her love and goodwill, shows the step-by-step process through which coercive control turns into physical violence. And after all Christy is a boxer, used to physical punishment and used to pain, so it’s very embarrassing for her to admit this is happening. But there’s a world of difference between the pain you choose and the pain that is forced upon you.
Mr. Foster specialises in playing men who are disgusted by their own worst instincts for violence and self-pity but unable to control them, and here he does more beautifully ugly work as a man who so resents his wife’s superior talents that he feels controlling her is the only way he can maintain his own good opinion of himself. Ms. Sweeney, who played another woman in a trap set by men in 2023’s Reality, here weaponises her physicality in the boxing scenes with unusual power and effect; we are made to feel the tortured emotions behind every punch, even when Christy is fighting an opponent who outweighs and outclasses her. Bryan Hibbard as Christy’s Elvis-obsessed gym manager and the only person with the courage to involve himself in her problems also does really thoughtful work as a man who doesn’t want to believe his own eyes. And speaking of eyes, Katy O’Brian plays Lisa Holewyne, the boxer who is Christy’s most serious professional rival before becoming part of her support team. My god that woman has screen presence; it’s no surprise major blockbusters (like Twisters and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning) are simply desperate to cast her any way they possibly can. Here Lisa is one of the very few people who both sees Christy clearly and also gets under Christy’s skin, simply by showing up and turning her attention towards her. Anyone would buckle at the knees. It brings out the best in Ms. Sweeney to work with another person from whom you can’t look away.
Director David Michôd, who co-wrote the script with Mirrah Foulkes from a story by Katherine Fugate, is still best known for 2010’s Animal Kingdom, which was set in his home country of Australia and has the same ferocious appetite for violence (and nightmarish mother). Christina Flannery’s costumes lean hard on the flowery, Laura Ashley-style shoulder-padded pastels that were a mainstay of professional women’s wardrobes of the time but people now prefer to forget. The working-class people and settings are never patronised, which is unusual these days in American cinema, and Matt Villa’s editing helps the passage of time feel extraordinarily clear. The ending is also genuinely shocking in more ways than one, and the entire cast and crew are to be congratulated for making a real life story feel so fresh and unexpected. It’s obvious what drew the very savvy Ms. Sweeney to this project, and it’s obvious that Christy will find a broader audience than this kind of female empowerment story usually enjoys. If this is the price a woman must pay to live her life on her own terms, she will pay it without hesitation.
Christy recently played at the London Film Festival. It will play in theaters on November 7, 2025.
Learn more about the film, including how to get tickets, at the official site for the title.
You might also like…
