A young American woman comes to Europe for a place in an exclusive academy, at about the same time as her predecessor is brutally murdered, and discovers that there is something sinister, even supernatural, afoot in these hallowed halls. This is essentially the plot of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), and of his Phenomena (1985) too – and writer/director Nikias Chryssos has more or less lifted it wholesale for Bloody Tennis, except with a few significant tweaks here and there that amplify the absurdity while ensuring its difference from these models.
The first difference is in the title. “French monks brought tennis to this area in the thriteenth century,” says Mary Tyrone (Elina Löwensohn) as she welcomes her latest student – and, indirectly, us – to the Tennis Academy that bears her name, “Now we join ancient traditon and state of the art technology to move the bodies and minds of the crème de la crème of tennis.” Tennis dominates the film. In the prologue, a young, appareled, injured woman (Ambre Olive) dies on a court, receiving her coupde grâce from a ball machine. The traditional process of stringing a racket with cat gut, training exercises and instruction, special diets and physiotherapy, the often cutthroat principles of competition, and of course games and matches – these are the flesh and blood of Bloody Tennis. Students who lose are unceremoniously eliminated, while the prize dangled for the final winner is official entry in an international championship.
Newcomer Sophie is played by Sandra Gulberg Kampp, whose surname coincides neatly with the film’s tone. For while in Argento’s Suspiria – if perhaps not so much in the 2018 reimagining by Luca Guadagnino (who also if course directed 2024’s tennis-focused Challengers) – ballet at the Tanzakademie is a mere front for a hidden coven of witches who cast their malicious spell over the city, in Bloody Tennis, the Academy is in the middle of nowhere, and tennis is no cover, but the actual goal, as Mary, her fellow teacher Stavkos (Zlatko Burić) and weird handyman Fred (Vincent Romeo) are genuinely using their dark arts to create a champion of the courts. In other words, the stakes in this film are absurdly microfocused, as everything comes down to the game – and even if tennis is being used as a metaphor for life’s dog-eat-dog Darwinian struggles, with survival reserved not just for the fittest, but for the most calculating, cunning and cruel, the sport itself is presented in goofily literal terms. Meanwhile Löwensohn, Buric and Romeo positively relish overplaying their villainous characters. The staff at the academy grin, gurn and guffaw their way through the film’s increasingly fantastical horrors, licensing the viewer too not to take any of this too seriously.
Sophie and the other five students – her lover Bana (Tracy Gotoas), drug-addicted room mate Heidi (Helena Zengel), arch rival Nelly (Lily Taieb), as well as Frida (Juliana Vieira-Guerra) and Xue (Lucie Zhang) – may dine, shower and party together in close quarters, but the harsh lesson that they are learning in the Academy is that ultimately they are all opponents rather than friends, in a game where it is every player for herself. They have to hunger to win, and while Sophie does not immediately adjust to stomaching the meaty, bloody diet on offer, soon she is raring to down it all and more, and proves as bloodthirsty as the leeches which Mary keeps and administers as her cure for wellness.
Sophie’s late mother was herself a one-time tennis professional who gave up her sporting career to have her daughter, and then died of a drug overdose. If Sophie is to outdo her legacy and to become the world champion that her mother (at her peak ranked 622nd in the world) never could be, she must and will engage, metaphorically if not literally, in the matriphagy of which Mary speaks – and with her own mother long since dead, Sophie now has only Mary as both her mother figure and ‘daddy’. “This is not a game we play, it is a sacred rite,” Mary tells Sophie – and Mary will, in her own way, feed Sophie’s ultimate victory through a willing act of perverse communion. After all, everyone whom Sophie has bested becomes a part of her own inexorable success, in a film that expresses the high price of winning through the language of genre.
As a new arrival, Sophie is the focal point of our identification from the start, and her journey through the film’s peculiar world is also ours. Yet as she learns to “grow, win, transcend”, the ruthlessness that she acquires – both in pursuit of her dream and as part of her rite de passage – becomes ever more alienating, until in the end the viewer is not sure whether to celebrate or to abhor the final-girl triumph of this monster in the making on her road to Wembley. Either way, Chryssos’ Bloody Tennis serves daftly dark comedy, psychological deviance, grotesque gore, surreal sadism, adolescent emergence – and aces it all, game, set and match.
strap: Nikias Chryssos’ surreal, Suspiria-like sports horror referees the unspeakable price of victory in a cutthroat, campy competition
© Anton Bitel
