113 min | R | September 24, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Two ballet students at an elite Paris academy fight for one contract that only one of them can win. They become friends, then lovers, then enemies, sometimes within the same scene. The dancing is the least interesting thing about it.
Kate Sanders and Marine Elise Durand are dancers at a prestigious Paris ballet academy. They compete for a single contract with the Opera National de Paris that will define one career and end another. Sarah Adina Smith builds the film as a study of how ambition turns intimacy into a weapon. The two young women become friends, then lovers, then rivals, and the film refuses to keep those categories separate. The real subject is the cost of wanting one thing so badly that you will trade everything else to get it.
Diana Silvers plays Kate as an American outsider who arrives late and underprepared and treats her own body as a problem to be solved through force. She dances with a stubbornness that reads as desperation. Kristine Froseth plays Marine with a fragility that curdles into cruelty under pressure. She carries the grief of a dead brother into every movement and lets it warp her judgment. Jacqueline Bisset plays Madame Brunelle, the academy director who manipulates her students with a calm that makes the abuse worse, and she gives the film its coldest center.
Smith adapts A.K. Small’s novel “Bright Burning Stars” and directs with a taste for the lurid. The cinematography drops the dancers into saturated reds and bruised blues that push the ballet world toward nightmare. A drug-fueled nightclub sequence dissolves the boundary between the girls until the editing can no longer tell them apart, and the film stages identity itself as something that bleeds. Smith piles psychosexual tension, body horror, and class resentment onto a frame that strains to hold all of it. The dancing gets crowded out by the melodrama that surrounds it.
The film commits to its gothic register and earns the atmosphere. It does not earn the plot. Smith keeps adding incident when she should trust the central relationship to carry the weight. Kate and Marine are vivid enough that their collision needs no help, and the surrounding machinery distracts from the thing the film does best. What remains is a fever dream about two dancers who destroy each other and cannot decide whether that is love or war.