Shadows on the Wall

The Cut

dir Sean Ellis
scr Justin Bull
prd Mark Lane, Leonora Darby, James Harris, Orlando Bloom, Adam Karasick, Bret Saxon
with Orlando Bloom, Caitriona Balfe, John Turturro, Ed Kear, Andonis Anthony, Mohammed Mansaray, Clare Dunne, Eric D Smith, Gary Beadle, Oliver Trevena, Danielle Lewis, Gemma Acosta
release US 5.Sep.25
24/UK 1h39

TORONTO FILM FEST

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There's an impressive intensity to this movie, which begins as a boxing drama and spirals into something much more horrific. Writer Justin Bull and director Sean Ellis dive into a tough-talking world in which beefy men are willing to do absolutely anything to make their dream come true, no matter what it might cost them. While this creates interesting characters, there are few we actually care about.

After a shock loss ended his career, a boxer (Bloom) has retired to run a gym with his trainer-girlfriend Caitlin (Balfe). A decade later, promoter Donny (Beadle) turns up to offer him a comeback fight. But he'll need to lose 26 pounds in less than a week. Heading to Vegas, he works with his team (Kear and Anthony) before they hire the shadowy Boz (Turturro), who puts the boxer through a gruelling illegal weight-cut programme that will either work or kill him. Caitlin and his sidekicks struggle to support him as things get seriously intense.

Intercut with the narrative are flashbacks to the boxer's childhood as a boy (Smith) in Troubles-torn Northern Ireland with his hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold mother (Dunne). These scenes grow in intensity along with the main plot, leading to some outrageously harrowing sequences that combine violence with the horrors of addiction and worse. And the boxer's hallucinations are just as nasty as his flashbacks, especially when Lupe (Mansaray) begins supplying, and also using, dangerous drugs.

Bloom dives impressively into this role, although he goes so deep that, like this man's closest friends, we begin to give up on him along the way. This unnamed boxer is so focussed on this task that he is willing to let everything and everyone around him go. Opposite him, the excellent Balfe has a spark of compassion as Caitlin, so it's frustrating that the script sidelines her to make room for Turturro's fabulous scene-stealing energy as a Mephistopheles type who charismatically demands the boxer's body and soul.

Even more than the unlikable characters, or the whispering incoherence of the deliberately momentous dialog, the premise's inherent implausibility is a niggling problem. It's impossible to believe that a man could lose this much weight, spiralling into drug and deprivation induced nightmares, barely able to stand, and yet still have the strength to wage a championship boxing match. The bout itself plays out with inventive understatement, and it pays off in a coda that almost feels tacked on to offer some mercy to the audience.

themes, language, violence 12.Aug.25

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