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For about five minutes, “The Cut” gives the audience what they’d expect from a movie set in the world of boxing. A fighter played by Orlando Bloom is in the ring, and the action is ferocious, and ferociously photographed in bruising closeups. The punches are thunderous, the blood flows, and you know just what you’re going to get: another tough drama about an over-the-hill boxer getting one last shot at the big time.
And then director Sean Ellis (“Metro Manila,” “Eight for Silver”) and writer Justin Bull pull the rug out from under the audience – because that opening sequence in the ring is the last time boxing action is going to be center stage in “The Cut.” From there, it becomes a boxing drama in which the focus isn’t the fight, it’s the weigh-in, and in which the real violence isn’t the punching, it’s the dieting.
“The Cut,” which had its world premiere on opening night of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday, is also a film in which the heart of the story isn’t found in the sweat and blood that occupy a large chunk of the film; it’s the quiet conversations between the unnamed boxer played by Bloom and his partner and trainer, Caitlin (Catriona Balfe), a couple who are irretrievably bound to the world of boxing but who have no illusions about the price that exacts.
Balfe (“Belfast,” “Outlander”) can be an uncommonly grounded actress, and she and Bloom create a lived-in relationship that humanizes and creates real stakes for the pugilistic histrionics that surround it. His character’s lack of a name may position him as an everyman, but the little moments of their relationship – glances, raised eyebrows, tilted heads – give his couple a specificity and a shared history in a way exposition never could.
When it comes to his professional life, we know that Bloom’s character was called “the Wolf of Dublin” and that he’s the boxer with the highest knockout-to-win ratio in super-welterweight history. But after the opening few minutes of fisticuffs, we return to him 10 years past his last title shot, with the boxer reduced to teaching kids (which he seems happy to embrace) and scrubbing floors (not so much) in the gym owned by Caitlin, the daughter of a legendary trainer who wanted sons, not daughters.
Faster than you can say “Rocky,” the washed-up and beaten-down fighter is offered a title shot; the catch is that it’s in one week away in Las Vegas, and it’s in the 154-pound weight class. The aging Wolf of Dublin weighs 186, and Caitlin, the reasonable sort, doesn’t think there’s any way he can make the weight in time. But he has to try – because, he says, he tried to move on “but that hunger stayed in me.”
“The hunger never leaves you. You have to learn to live with it,” Caitlin implores.
“I can’t,” he says. “I won’t. I just need to get into that ring, and I need you to get me there.”
The over-the-hill fighter with one last shot at the title is a time-honored boxing-movie setup, and Ellis clearly knows that it’ll bring audience expectations of training montages. But you haven’t really seen training montages like the training montages in “The Cut” – which aren’t even montages, because they take up the bulk of the movie.
It turns out that he doesn’t need Caitlin to get him there; in fact, she can’t and won’t get him there, because she cares too much about him to push him to those extremes. And Bloom’s boxer certainly can’t get there on his own: His response to pressure is to head to the vending machine, get a candy bar, gulp it down and then go into the bathroom and force himself to throw up, something Bloom does with entirely unnerving conviction.
The fight promoter, who is not above bending whatever rules he needs to bend, brings in Boz, a pathologically brutal trainer and motivator played by John Turturro with an unhealthy amount of relish. “He doesn’t give a s— about you,” warns Caitlin, and Boz agrees.
“Your girl’s right,” he says. “I don’t give a s— about you. The only thing I care about is winning…. To make the weight, you’re gonna have to take the brakes off.”
Boz is a brutal man with a closet full of demons and effective if sometimes lethal training methods, and Caitlin high-tails it out of Vegas when the boxer goes along with the plan. Before long, the regimen leaves him hallucinating and passing out from 24 hours a day of sweating, running, working out and, oh yeah, taking diuretics and other drugs that’d be illegal if this title bout were to have pre-fight drug tests, which Boz assures him it won’t.
This isn’t your regular boxing-prep footage – it’s hallucinatory, overwrought and insane on a Darren Aronofsky “Requiem for a Dream” level. “We’ll squeeze your damn soul out if we have to,” says Boz, who’d be a total caricature if Turturro didn’t give him enough small glimpses of what might pass for humanity in this particular neighborhood.
Just as “The Cut” finds a relatively new angle on the fight movie, Ellis and editor Mátyás Fekete take a different approach to the training. The usual fast cuts and staccato pacing are dispensed of for the most part, replaced by relentless immersion in something deeply ugly. There’s nothing triumphant about this prep; it makes you want to look away, not raise your hands in exultation.
As for what happens – well, you have to see it to believe it, and even when you see it you might not believe it.
In recent years, boxing films have often as not justified the form by being as punishing as possible, and there’s plenty of that in “The Cut.” But the film is bookended by quiet scenes between a man and a woman, by beautifully understated performances by Bloom and Balfe. Understatement in a boxing movie? If you look past the savagery of the middle hour, that could be the craziest thing about this new take on an old genre.
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