Pretty Lethal (2026)

Cracking nuts and taking names

There’s a scene at the one-hour mark of Pretty Lethal where five ballerinas, in tutus turned ragged and bloodstained from a long night, fight their way through a mob of gangsters using improvised weapons and ballet moves, all set to “Waltz of the Flowers” from the Nutcracker. It is, no exaggeration, my favorite movie scene of the year so far. Five minutes of bloody, giddy genre catharsis. Let that be the lens through which you read everything else I’m about to say, because the rest of this review is going to be more measured; but Pretty Lethal earns my passing grade off the strength of culminating with one set piece, plus a likable ensemble, plus the simple fact that 87North’s last action confection I saw, Love Hurts, was an obnoxious misfire and this one is, at minimum, a course correction.

The movie is a survival thriller from director Vicky Jewson, in which a fractious ballet troupe, en route to an international competition in Budapest, gets stranded after their bus breaks down in a remote forest and takes shelter at the Teremok Inn, presided over by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman), a former prima ballerina turned local mob queen. Things escalate quickly. A little too quickly, I’d say: there’s an abrupt death of a major character in the first act that lands with a roller coaster jerk, and for a stretch afterwards, the film plays less like an action movie than like a slasher, with the girls being stalked one small-scale encounter at a time. Pretty Lethal takes a while to figure out its identity, in a way I don’t entirely hate; some tone swerving is fun. It’s just that the figuring-out is a little more visible and bumpy than it probably needed to be.

But once the survival-combat mode kicks in, the movie fires pretty nicely. The build to the aforementioned bar brawl is well-paced, with the ballerinas discovering their lethality in a steady, satisfying rhythm. This progression into genre violence is captured nicely in those white practice tutus the girls are forced into early in the movie, which get progressively dirtier, bloodier, and more shredded as the carnage piles up. By the time the Tchaikovsky needle drop hits, the outfits look like they’ve been pulled out of a war zone, dainty and lethal at the same time. It’s an evocative production touch that suggests Jewson and her team had a very clear vision of what the movie should be, even when the script doesn’t quite hold up its end.

The cast is headlined by a series of young women who are clearly more confident in banter and cast chemistry than in the actual action, but I still ended up liking them. The five-girl ensemble has just enough differentiation: Bones (Maddie Ziegler) is the street-smart lead dancer, Princess (Lana Condor) is the socialite rich bitch, Grace (Avantika) is the deeply religious one (who spends half the movie on a drug trip) and the funniest of the bunch, Zoe (Iris Apatow) is the warm heart of the group, and her deaf sister Chloe (Millicent Simmonds). The latter role was specifically rewritten for the hearing-impaired Simmonds, with the sound design occasionally slipping into her perspective during the action, which is a nice touch. Ziegler is probably the most confident in the martial arts work and Condor the least, though Condor is, by contrast, my favorite performer in the non-combat stretches. The group has a nice rapport; even with minimal setup, you believe these girls have spent years together.

What you don’t quite believe is most of what surrounds them. Thurman is a strange misfire here as the villain. The film dwells upon her mysterious background, which she finally monologues towards the end of the film. Her story runs parallel to the main plot rather than meaningfully colliding with it. Oddly, The Bride herself has not a single proper action scene of her own. The villain ensemble around her is an interchangeable gallery of personality-less heavies.

I’m also mixed on the production: The lighting is murky, and the color grading washes the whole inn in an off-putting tinted gloom (knockoff John Wick and Dan Laustsen for sure). The gothic set design, evoking old Eastern Europe, with lots of arched stone and wrought iron, deserves much better than the look the movie gets.

The film’s biggest problem is the last twenty-five minutes: The entire stretch after the bar ballet brawl shifts the dramatic onus onto Thurman’s Devora and builds to a bland anti-climax. Then, the movie-closing coda is so on-the-nose about the Pretty Lethal’s feminist, “you go gurl” themes that it tips into the ludicrous. Still, the whole thing is less than 90 minutes, so it’s not much of a drag. The film has a vision which it executes with sufficient clarity and grace, especially in its middle act. It’s enough for the whole experience to hold together, but just barely.

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.