There are two kinds of cinephile: those who hear a movie described as “Black Swan on ice” and sneer, noses upturned, their one-line, one-and-a-half star review already written in their head; and those who hear the same thing and think, “hell yeah, let’s go!” Judging by the French-language reviews on Letterboxd, the Cannes Film Festival has an abundance of the former. But this writer, for better or worse, lands in the latter camp. Viewers likewise inclined, then, should get hyped for the best movie about youth sports we’ve seen in years.
Wendy Zhang Zifeng, a child actress with credits in films like the Detective Chinatown series, Oxide Pang’s Andy Lau vehicle High Forces, and Feng Xiaogang’s disaster film Aftershock, plays a young skater named Jiang Ning who is training for the last big tournament of the year: win and she moves on to the world championships; lose and her career is over. Her mom, Wang Shuang, also her coach, is tough and demanding. A former skater herself, she pours all the frustrations of her own failed career onto her daughter. She’s a nightmare of a stage mom, alternately biting in her criticisms or flat-out ignoring her daughter in favor of other skaters. Zhang is 24 years old now, but it’s unclear how old her character is supposed to be: with her slight skater’s build and runaway emotions, she seems more troubled teen than burnt-out adult, but it’s vague and really it doesn’t matter. Complications ensue when Jiang meets and befriends a girl who works at the practice rink, Zhong Ling (played by newcomer Ding Xiangyaun), who skates on her own after hours. Zhong is everything Jiang is not and wishes she could be: free, confident, open to the world. But Wang notices her too, and when she takes Zhong on as a student, Jiang’s precarious psychological state becomes increasingly erratic.
Black Swan is the obvious point of comparison, but there are elements too of ‘90s psychological thrillers like Single White Female, Basic Instinct, and Perfect Blue, post-feminist films built around women competing with each other for personal and professional success. But where Darren Aronofsky in Black Swan pushes the horror elements of the scenario, emphasizing the grotesque effects ballet can have on the human body (and drawing a parallel between them and his heroine’s psychological contortions), Girl on Edge plays its drama relatively straight. Jiang Ning may fantasize and hallucinate, but director Zhou Jinghao grounds his film in the everyday realism of the sports film. Nothing too crazy happens in Girl on Edge: the parties are normal teen parties (albeit in an abandoned mall-turned-roller rink), the injuries, scrapes, and bruises are real but not ghastly, and the little indignities and cruelties of the mother-daughter/coach-athlete relationship are all too common. Zhou pays special attention to the skate sequences, which are uniformly excellent and filmed in a variety of interesting ways, all to maximize the beauty, difficulty, and impact of the skater’s movements, and just how precarious they are at all times, gliding on a knife along hard frozen water.
This means that while Girl on Edge takes the scenario of psychological horror, it actually plays like a sports drama. It’s outlandish elements are not so much an opportunity for shock or titillation as in Black Swan — this film’s equivalent of that film’s love scene finds the two women sharing a bed during a sleepover, scooching ever so slightly closer together while facing opposite directions under the covers — but instead function more as metaphor for the demented requirements of high achievement in any kind of youth sport. Girl on Edge’s world of figure skating resembles almost exactly the worlds of ballet and youth baseball that this writer’s kids are trying to manage, in their insane demands for time and energy, but also in the fact that much of the psychological pressure they inspire is wholly self-inflicted — one of the film’s slightest yet most affecting scenes comes when Jiang confronts a rival skater who she thinks has sabotaged her, only for the girl to respond that she came in next to last in her last tournament: she’s going to college and doesn’t care if she wins or loses, certainly not enough to mess with another competitor. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: an athlete never competes with another person; their greatest opponent is always themself.
As the requirements of the scenario unfold in the film’s final 20 minutes or so, Zhou isn’t content to simply rest on the revealed, but by no means unexpected, twists. Rather, he drives home this lesson and allows his heroine her moment of triumph. In these last scenes, Girl on Edge turns into a truly moving sports movie. It’s not just “Black Swan on ice.” It’s The Cutting Edge, but more alive and half as cruel.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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