Film Review: Christy

Christy
Director: David Michôd
Black Bear Pictures, Anonymous Content, Votiv Films, Yoki, Inc., Fifty-Fifty Films
In Theaters: 11.07.2025

The reason that boxing will always be one of the top sports represented on film is pretty clear, even if you’ve been hit in the head a few too many times: It follows a single protagonist literally fighting their way to victory. These types of movies always lean into the metaphorical element of this, and there’s always something bigger to fight than an opponent in the ring. Christy is no exception, and in the case of this true story, the real fight was far more brutal than anyone ever imagined.

Christy Salters (Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria, Anyone But You), the daughter of a West Virginia coal miner, never imagined life beyond her small-town roots — until she discovered she could fight. Fierce, ambitious and gifted with a devastating punch, she rises through the male-dominated world of boxing under the guidance of her trainer Jim Martin (Ben Foster, The Messenger, Leave No Trace). Martin passionately believes in Christy’s ability to go the distance, and despite a significant age difference, he asks her to marry him. Christy says yes, buying into not only Jim’s insistence that she needs him more than he needs her, but that she can never find acceptance or greatness in this world unless she rejects the truth that she is a lesbian. In their time together, Christy emerges as a star, and the first woman signed by promoter Don King (Chad L. Coleman, The Orville, Copshop). But as her fame grows, Christy’s personal life spirals out of control, and though she realizes that her relationship with Jim needs to end, he makes it clear that if she leaves him, it will be over his dead body — or hers.

Christy is a disturbing and powerful story full of dramatic turns and literal life or death situations, so why is it such a slog to get through most of the way? Director David Michôd’s sluggish pacing is a major factor. Most of the characters are too broadly drawn to allow the audience to feel the kind of investigation that’s needed to make the story take off. Chief among these are the villains of the story: the abusive Jim and Christy’s deeply homophobic, conservative Christian mother, Joyce (Merritt Wever, Nurse Jackie). In fairness, there’s no escaping that these two are odious people, but the screenplay by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes (Judy & Punch) fails to make them feel human enough to sell us on their individual abilities to control Christy. 

A simple rule of filmmaking is that the audience has to get to know the characters in the course of a movie in a way that you simply don’t in real life, and that requires a degree of heightened storytelling. If the film allowed us to view them from Christy’s manipulated point of view for just a moment, it might have provided a glimmer of the people that Christy so desperately wants them to be. The lack of any modicum of charm or dimension undercuts Christy’s character, leaving us unsold on her need to please both of them, and it teeters toward unintentionally victim blaming. The film digs deep and comes out swinging in the last 25 minutes, and that’s enough to elevate it from a failed movie to a not entirely successful movie, and this allows audiences to leave the theater on high note, possibly even with the artificial feeling that the movie was a satisfying experience.

Sweeney deserves credit for the work she put into the role, working as hard to be taken seriously as Christy herself. The actress has been mistreated by the Internet, half of which used her as a punching bag while the other half used her merely as a pair of fun bags, with almost no one treating her as a person who is working hard in an often problematic industry. While her performance here isn’t the best of her career (for that, check out Reality on HBO Max), it’s a raw and effective portrayal of a complicated person, and whether it’s deserving of any awards or not, it’s certainly deserving of attention. Foster is an intense and talented actor who has a gift for bringing nuance to less than sympathetic characters, and the fact that he’s not able to do so here  signifies a major failure, and most of it doesn’t rest on his shoulders. By far the best and most likable turn comes from Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding) as Lisa Holewyne, a boxer who goes toe to toe with Christy in the ring, and later comes back to help train her. Whenever O’Brian is on screen, everything falls into place and Christy becomes everything it wants to be, and if that doesn’t scream “give her some solid leading roles!” I don’t know what does.

Christy isn’t a bad movie, but given the amount of work put into it by Sweeney alone, to say nothing of the rest of the cast and crew, being a forgettable and disposable movie may be an even more frustrating end result. —Patrick Gibbs

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