Christy (15)
Directed by David Michod
★★★★

DUBBED “the coalminer’s daughter,” Christy Martin was a young woman from a religious working-class US family who became a trailblazer and put women’s boxing on the map for the first time in the 1990s. But, as this film demonstrates, she was fighting for her life both in the ring and behind closed doors at home.  

Co-writer and director David Michod (Animal Kingdom, The King) brings Christy’s remarkable and complex true story of resilience, true grit and extraordinary courage to the big screen, driven by a transformative and career-defining performance from Sydney Sweeney. She put on 35 pounds (around two-and-a-half stones) and trained relentlessly for the role, while Ben Foster also bulked up and is virtually unrecognisable as Christy’s trainer/manager and abusive husband Jim Martin. 

The film opens in 1989 in West Virginia when a teenage Christy, who had a high-school girlfriend, discovered she was good at boxing. Within minutes the film establishes her fractured relationship with her mother (Merritt Wever) who refused to accept that her daughter was gay and suggested she go to a priest to sort her out. 

In order to progress in boxing Christy denied and hid her sexuality, and married Jim, entering into a coercive and controlling relationship. As her career flourished, after becoming the first female fighter to be signed up by legendary boxing promoter Don King (Chad L Coleman), her personal life became a living hell. It is very difficult and harrowing to watch. 

The boxing scenes pull no punches, showing the brutality of the sport, and mirror the real-life bouts Christy fought. However it is the depiction of the emotional and physical abuse she suffered at Jim’s hands that is heart-stopping to witness as it leads to the bone-chilling finale in which he brutally stabbed and shot Christy, leaving her for dead. As the violence escalated no-one stepped in to help her, including her mother who she turned to for advice, but who insisted it was all her own fault and she should obey her husband rather than leave him.  

This is a film that unpacks a lot as it does justice to Christy Martin’s incredible, yet little-known true story, and how she decided finally to live life on her own terms as a queer boxer while helping others avoid what she underwent.

This is a must-see.  

In cinemas November 28.