Bloody Tennis
by Hope Madden
German filmmaker Nikias Chryssos does not hide his influences. After witnessing the brutal slaying of a beautiful girl, we watch a young American student being driven to an exotic if spooky European academy where she will be trained among the elite in her field.
Bloody Tennis is Suspiria for athletes. Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is the athlete newly arrived at the Mary Tyrone Tennis Academy. She’s welcomed, in a way, by Ms. Tyrone (Elina Löwensohn, Nadja) herself. It isn’t a warm welcome.
“I’m your daddy now.”
The class is small: six players (minutes the girl we watched die in the opening moments, whose absence makes room for Sophie). Aside from Ms. Tyrone, head mistress and team doctor, there’s one coach (Zlatko Buric) and one handyman/chauffeur/cook/weirdo (Vincent Romeo).
Though the title suggests a campy comedy, the dark, creepy humor that runs through Bloody Tennis is anything but camp. And while his underlying structure is reminiscent of Suspiria, Chryssos leans just as heavily toward slasher. (Also an Italian genre, owing to Mario Bava’s 1971 originator, A Bay of Blood).
That’s not to suggest the film is somehow untrue to its title. There’s a lot of blood (some of it pretty inspired) and a lot of tennis.
Though Guldberg Kampp is not entirely convincing as an American (she’s Danish), her performance otherwise compellingly anchors the film. Sophie is curious and observant, her personality mainly interior. Guldberg Kampp navigates Sophie’s arc with a quietly animalistic nature that suits the film and the character.
The rest of the athletes are offered little opportunity to really craft characters, but each is solid. Löwensohn’s gleefully committed and Romeo is unsettlingly odd.
The film’s themes are as unhidden as its influences. Training to be an elite athlete is a soul and body ruining exercise, as punishing as it is bloodthirsty. There is perhaps less depth and less mystery to Bloody Tennis than it needed to be genuinely memorable, but it’s an intriguing, gory reminder that women’s sports is where it’s at.
