Film Review: CHRISTY: A Riveting & Heartbreaking Boxing Icon Biopic [TIFF 2025]

Christy Review

Christy (2025) Film Review from the 50th Annual Toronto International Film Festival, a movie directed by David Michôd, written by Mirrah Foulkes and David Michôd, and starring Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Chad L. Coleman, Merritt Wever, Katy O’Brian, Ethan Embry, Jess Gabor, Chad Coleman, Bryan Hibbard, and Gilbert Cruz.

Christy presents the viewer with the story of a hopeful, happy boxing ingénue of immense talent and power who sees life as a book she is actively writing in and over which she has total control. Her sexuality, complicating her family and social dynamics, is touched upon but doesn’t overpower the film’s narrative. Instead, it’s an ebbing current through it, causing happiness and joy, sadness and pain as it pulses up and down in Christy Martin (Sydney Sweeney)’s life. Though never broached in the film, Christy’s sexuality may be one of her motivations to box—taking out her internal frustrations outwardly.

A good protagonist is measured by their antagonist, i.e., the stronger the hero, the stronger their opposition needs to be to create tension, something for the hero to thwart, or someone for the hero to overcome, if the hero, in fact, can do so. Christy’s coach and eventual husband, James Martin (Ben Foster), is that antagonist in Christy, and to a lesser extent, so is Christy’s mother, Joyce Salters (Merritt Wever). At first shown as a chauvinist that wants to be rid of his sole female boxing trainee, James quickly recognizes Christy’s raw talent and potential after a humorous incident inside of a practice boxing ring.

Whether James Martin was always a sociopath or became one because of his proximity to a viable victim, his transformation, or unveiling, throughout Christy is astonishing. His proposal to Christy is extremely strange yet illustrates his key personality traits—fragility, deceit, jealousy, manipulativeness, vengefulness (emotional and physical), and acting three steps ahead, e.g., James’ eventual secret communications with Christy’s family about Christy. If James Martin, this monster, was not in the film, like Mary Lee Johnston in Lee Daniels’ Precious, the film would not be as good. The story benefits from him and his escalating sadism. He makes the film more and more engrossing as the viewer begins to wonder, what is he going to do or initiate next? James becomes a story element that keeps the viewer constantly engaged throughout the film.

Christy’s strength, like Million Dollar Baby’s strength, is that the viewer doesn’t expect or see where the film is going to end up until it gets there. Both films are advertised as mere boxing movies, but they are not. These films are about the lives of the boxers inside and outside of the arena and the lives of the people that come in direct contact with them.

Whether it’s the preparation for a fight, an actual bout, or a domestic situation, James Martin creates a work and home-life environment in which Christy is dependent on him (or he wants her to think she is), with Christy losing the control she once had over her existence and its direction. The Don King incident is an illustration of this, and Christy, very briefly, sees James as the liar and manipulator he has always been before the euphoria and momentum of the Don King contract moment overshadows everything. This scene, in which no one checked the fight tape before presenting it to fight promoter extraordinaire King, also makes clear that Christy has the moxie and improvisation skills to exist and navigate on her own. That she could have gotten a meeting with Don King without James and most likely would have had James and Christy never met.

The physical abuse that Christy Martin eventually endures is tastefully kept off-screen at its outset, mirroring that abuse being kept out of the public eye, and from her family and friends. The viewer hears the physical assaults but doesn’t see them. What is initially shown onscreen is the possessiveness, the fixation, and the misreads of common courtesies transmogrified into a reason to hit and degrade, similar to the husband-and-wife situation in Brian Gibson’s What’s Love Got to Do with It. Sensing a lack of total control, seeing Christy glimpse a world outside of himself, the need to re-establish control and dominance increases James Martin’s vile acts to sadistic levels later in the film.

The culminating abuse scene in Christy, where James’ desire to “talk” turns into something mortal and deadly, will be shocking to those unfamiliar with Christy Martin’s story. I doubt anyone, besides a professional athlete predisposed to enduring oodles of pain and having a high pain threshold, could have survived that culminating moment, let alone had the resolve and ability to get themselves up off the floor. Christy is not someone that can be termed as ‘ordinary’ and proves so on her bloody walk out of her abusive marriage and into a new chapter in her life.

Three events happen after the culminating scene – two grotesqueries (James Martin and Joyce Salters) are told to their faces what Christy thinks of them and their deleterious effect on her life, and Christy Martin steps back into the ring. The former two events bolster the film and give it a sense of completion. The latter is supposed to do the same but hurts the realism of the film. Training for a fight two weeks after living through the physical injuries Christy Martin experiences is absurd. If this really happened, it’s extraordinary. If it didn’t, and the timeline is sped up in the film to add a Hollywood capstone to the storyline, which is what I suspect, it is unnecessary and makes Christy look more superhuman and unrecognizable rather than human and recognizable, mortal, like the rest of us. No matter the reality of her eventual comeback, the fact remains: Christy Martin came back and fought again.

Rating: 8/10

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