Locarno 2026 Review: BLOODY TENNIS Serves Up a Blood-Soaked Sports-Horror Satire

Locarno’s Fuori Concorso section introduced Nikias Chryssos’ English-language debut Bloody Tennis, which pushes the brutality of sports competition to sadistic extremes.

Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) arrives at a supposedly prestigious tennis academy hidden in southern Europe. She is welcomed by the academy’s mysterious director, portrayed by Bertrand Mandico regular Elina Löwensohn.

Löwensohn’s Mary runs the academy in a highly unconventional fashion, with only one coach, Stavkos (Zlatko Burić), who barely conceals his indifference toward its all-female cohort of future tennis superstars. The academy has one other employee, Fred (Vincent Romeo), who does everything from janitorial work and driving to ritual sacrifice, and looks as though he wandered out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show rather than into a tennis academy. From day one, there is something shady about the institution, which has the decrepit feel of an abandoned summer camp despite its promise to propel young talent to the top.

While Sophie initially battles demons of her own, she soon becomes entangled in Mary’s mind games, which form part of the regular training regimen. A Wimbledon wild card awaits somewhere at the end of the academy’s selection process. That Mary is a sadistic matron becomes apparent soon enough, as her dubious methods pit every athlete in the small, select group against the others, especially when romantic feelings develop among them.

Bloody Tennis draws Sophie into a closed community in which abuse becomes a daily tool and survival is inseparable from training. The academy promises excellence, but its real curriculum is obedience. Every drill, humiliation and grotesque initiation becomes another bizarre step on the journey to the top.

Bloody Tennis is another link in a lineage extending from boarding-school terrors to institutional satires and female body horror. Chryssos’ film is a mixed bag of exploitation, occult cinema and camp horror, a small-scale cross between Suspiria and Battle Royale.

Sophie arrives at the camp as the virginal archetype of the final girl, but that innocence is tainted as soon as she is sucked into Mary’s sadistic method of grooming a future champion. Chryssos combines the mystery of what is happening on the compound, and why Fred is making racket strings from cat intestines, with a transformation of slasher tropes into literal tennis matches, where the last woman standing receives the Wimbledon invitation.

Bloody Tennis is a modestly-scaled genre movie whose analogy to elite sports is not even thinly veiled: The process is explicitly soul- and body-destroying. Chryssos folds old-school horror tropes into the contemporary form of so-called elevated horror, adding family psychology, group dynamics, queer desire, sadistic humor and a bloodthirsty drive to become a champion.

Curiously, Bloody Tennis works best when it embraces its vintage slasher core, shedding its pretensions as a mysterious occult thriller and turning into an unexpected yet bizarrely funny session of family therapy.

The film enjoyed its world premiere earlier this month at the Locarno Film Festival.