TL;DR: Bloody Tennis has an interesting sports-horror idea, some decent gore and a few good moments, but the execution is a bit uneven for me, where the characters, tennis elements and overall horror don't come together as well as they should.
Plot
Follows Sophie, who is admitted to an elite tennis academy hidden in the South of Europe, where she must contend with fierce competition and the school's increasingly sinister undercurrents.
An Interesting Horror Premise
There is actually plenty about competitive tennis that should naturally lend itself to horror when you think about it - the obsession with winning, physical punishment, pressure, perfectionism and the psychological side of competition all provide some useful material, and it is a sport where players can spend hours pushing themselves to their limits, and that creates an obvious opportunity for a filmmaker to explore the darker side of ambition.
Bloody Tennis does touch on those ideas, but I never felt it explored them deeply enough, as the movie often feels like it is moving from one strange idea to another without giving the strongest ones enough time to really land.
The sporting setting is definitely distinctive here, but the tennis itself doesn't always feel like an important enough part of the experience, with some moments where the physical nature of the sport works well with the horror, but lots of moments where that tension never really comes through enough.
The best sports horror uses the sport itself as part of the horror rather than simply putting a horror story inside a sporting environment, and Bloody Tennis gets there occasionally, but not consistently enough.
The Horror Is Hit And Miss
The horror is similarly uneven.
There are some dark moments and enough blood to satisfy anyone who wants their horror movie to actually get a bit messy, but I wouldn't say the gore consistently has the impact the movie is looking for - some of the more unpleasant imagery worked fine because it actually takes the physical side of tennis and pushes it somewhere uncomfortable, while some other moments felt more like the movie is trying to remind you that you're watching a horror film, so at times, it felt like the violence was doing more work than the characters, atmosphere or story.
The Style Doesn't Quite Match The Ideas
I quite liked the visual elements though - the bright tennis courts, sporting facilities and clean surroundings provided a good contrast with the darker material, which gives Bloody Tennis a look of its own, and there are certainly shots that make it clear Chryssos has a specific visual idea in mind.
There are also plenty of references and influences that can be felt throughout the film, particularly the tradition of strange, isolated academy horror, and I have read some critics comparing it with films like Suspiria, for me, though, the movie never reaches anywhere near that level.
The performances are decent enough however, with Sandra Guldberg Kampp doing enough in the lead role to keep things moving, but I didn't also didn't really find the characters as engaging as they needed to be, which is the scripts fault, not the actors, and in this kind of film, I do think it's importantto actually care about the people involved.
I don't need every horror character to be brilliantly written, but I would like some emotional investment, but here, I was probably more interested in the concept and the strange environment more than anything else, but the cast is actually one of the more interesting things about the movie on paper though, with a genuinely international group of performers, but the script just doesn't give them enough to work with.
Another issue for me was the tone - there are moments when Bloody Tennis feels like it wants to be a serious psychological horror movie, then it moves into much stranger and more exaggerated territory, and while some of the oddness works fine, it also does make some moments feel like they belong to a different movie.
There Are Some Good Ideas Here
Despite all of that, I don't think Bloody Tennis is a complete misfire - there is enough creativity here to stop it from being completely forgettable, and I would much rather watch a horror movie attempting something unusual than another generic supernatural movie that looks and feels like everything else.
The sports-horror combination has genuine potential, and there are glimpses of a much better movie throughout this one, the problem is that those glimpses are exactly what made me more frustrated with it.
I kept thinking the next section might finally push the concept further, or that the movie might properly commit to one of its more interesting ideas, but nope, it just frequently settled for being reasonable.
Final Thoughts
Bloody Tennis ends up not really becoming the dark sports-horror experience the title promises - a decent concept, some good gore and flashes of style aren't quite enough to overcome the uneven characters, tone and use of the tennis setting.