The competitive sports world is full of highs and lows. While acting as a venue for honing and celebrating skill and practice, it’s also made up of often abusive institutions that demand sacrifice. Agon, the debut feature from Italian director Giulio Bertelli, leans hard into that dark tension. It’s a fierce, experimental sports film, blurring reality and fiction through a vérité lens as it follows three women across different disciplines as they train for greatness. But as they inch closer to a fictional Olympic event, the pressure surrounding them begins to erode their minds, bodies, and souls.

Prepping for the fictional event Ludoj 2024, judo star Alice (real-life gold medalist and queer athlete Alice Bellandi), sharpshooter Alex (Sofija Zobina), and fencer Giovanna (Yile Vianello) are all on the brink of breakthrough. Each also faces a destabilizing hurdle: Alice battles a severe knee injury requiring surgery; Alex becomes the center of a PR nightmare after a video of her hunting wolves goes viral; and a tragic accident threatens Giovanna’s ability to compete. As Ludoj begins, all three push past their limits in pursuit of medals they’ve already sacrificed everything for.

Agon underscores just how brutal and dehumanizing modern elite athleticism can be. In a world where people are flattened into output—seen for their function, not their fullness—the film uses these women’s perspectives to argue there’s more to life than the title of “Olympian.” Bertelli frames athletes less as individuals and more as machinery, intercutting their struggles with stark, tech-driven imagery that mirrors industrial labor. It’s a quiet but biting comparison: bodies pushed to their limits, spirits worn down in the process. Each woman comes to represent a fragment—Alice the body, Alex the mind, Giovanna the soul—all fraying under forces beyond their control. It’s like Backspot filtered through a touch of Agnès Varda’s work and the scathing commentary of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle.

Agon’s realism is heightened by Bellandi’s presence. As the non-actor of the trio, the 2024 Paris Olympics judoka gold medalist brings an unforced authenticity to the role. What looks like intense stunt work is just another day on the mat for her. But beyond the physicality, she sells the pain: a throbbing, ever-present injury that lingers in every movement. The camera stays close, capturing her determination as something both admirable and quietly tragic—a portrait of resilience slowly at odds with reality. The practical effects don’t shy away from the grotesque either, emphasizing the toll these bodies endure off the mat just as much as on it. Now following Ronda Rousey’s footsteps in the Judo-Olympian-to-actress pipeline, I hope Bellandi takes more feature roles as she delivers a bold debut here.

That said, as Agon progressed, I felt lulled by indifference. I admired the heroines’ performances, and the critique of dehumanization in today’s sport scene is clear. But the three narrative threads unfold in ways that feel increasingly predictable. The tech‑infused imagery and “aura farming” visuals of the heroines on the brink are striking, but the constant technological visuals and subtext diminish the poignancy. Combine that with the relentlessly bleak tone, and at a certain point, inevitability feels telegraphed. What’s left is a sports drama rich in mood and meaning, but one that takes its time getting somewhere you already see coming.