The Cut (dir. Sean Ellis)

by Jack Martin | Sep 2, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 96 mins

UK Distributor: Altitude Films

UK Release Date: 5 September 2025

WHO’S IN THE CUT?

Orlando Bloom, Caitríona Balfe, John Turturro, Clare Dunne, Gary Beadle, Oliver Trevena, Ed Kear, Adonis Anthony, Mohammed Mansaray

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Sean Ellis (director, cinematographer), Justin Bull (writer), Orlando Bloom, Leonora Darby, Thomas Fanning, James Harris, Adam Karasick, Mark Lane and Bret Saxon (producers), Lorne Balfe and Stuart Michael Thomas (composers), Mátyás Fekete (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A boxer (Bloom) undergoes a gruelling weight-loss regime for an upcoming match…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE CUT?

“Even Rocky had a montage,” so goes one of the lyrics in the song played during Team America: World Police’s big training montage, simply titled “Montage”. That’s how synonymous with movies this particular trope is, specifically sports-centric ones like Cool Runnings, The Karate Kid and, yes, Rocky (hell, any of the Rocky movies). After all, it’s an incredibly convenient way of showing over a brief period of time the main character undergoing all sorts of physical and sometimes psychological turmoil in order to be in the best shape possible before the big climactic match, not to mention the fact that it’s sometimes the most entertaining and even inspiring part of the movie as you see the protagonist doing whatever they can to achieve the necessary body for their chosen sport.

Now, imagine if a whole movie was not just focused entirely on the training montage, but was also presented as the most horrifying and intense experience that any human, regardless of sport, could ever go through. The Cut, from director Sean Ellis, is that movie, and a few stumbles aside it’s a deeply unnerving study of how far one is willing to go in order to triumph, as well as an often-nightmarish psychological thriller that may have you looking at the typical training montage very differently from now on.

Orlando Bloom stars as an unnamed Irish boxer who, ten years prior, blew his chances of winning a title match after unresolved childhood trauma caused him to freeze in the ring. Now, he’s running a gym in Ireland with his wife and trainer Caitlin (Caitríona Balfe), but his inner shame of missing out on greatness still clearly haunts him. He and Caitlin are soon approached by big-time promoter Donny (Gary Beadle) who is looking for a last-minute replacement to fight a young YouTube-famous boxer at a championship match in Las Vegas, an offer that our conflicted protagonist and his even more conflicted wife eventually agrees to. The problem, though, is that he weighs roughly 30 pounds over the required weight, and with just days before the big match Donny brings in Roz (John Turturro), an unorthodox and exceptionally bullish trainer, to put the boxer under an extreme and morally questionable diet and exercise regime designed to sweat off all the excess weight, which soon puts him at odds with his teammates, his wife and even his own humanity.

The Cut pulls few punches in its brutal depiction of dehumanising weight-loss methods, which the filmmaking alone presents in such harsh and even terrifying fashion. Ellis (also the film’s cinematographer) employs tight close-up shots in scenes of Bloom’s exhausted protagonist barely being able to stand on a treadmill, let alone run on one, being served mere scraps of protein-laced food in tiny Tupperware boxes, and even having his sweat be scraped off every corner of his body with credit cards, all of which feel as though they should come with their own jump-scare musical stinger. Ellis’s filmmaking does well to put the viewer inside this guy’s increasingly delirious mind and have them witness him go through borderline torture just to drop a few measly pounds, even battling his own body dysmorphia by making himself throw up the slightest carb he puts into his mouth, which I as someone with an eating disorder (albeit not as extreme as the one Bloom has in this movie) did find quite hard to watch.

More importantly, though, the filmmaker creates a deeply unsettling atmosphere that conveys how genuinely scary it is to constantly be in a mindset where the slightest error or mistake can equal permanent failure. Later sequences see Ellis experiment with colour grading and distorted camera angles to reflect the surreal, almost David Lynch-esque psychosis that the protagonist becomes trapped within, all while John Turturro – at his most devilish here – looks on with enough bullying condescension to make even J.K. Simmons in Whiplash wet himself, which adds to the nightmare aesthetic that the filmmaker is eerily good at replicating. The whole time, you’re simply fixated on Orlando Bloom who, in perhaps the best performance of his career to date, undergoes a rigorous physical transformation where you can practically see the outlines of his abdominal bones, and as things reach a point where even the more antagonistic figures realise they may have gone too far, the actor keeps his composure as he expresses, with an ever-so-slightly unintelligible Irish accent, his deeper insecurities that may well be the fat he needs to ultimately drop.

The film only falters when it keeps cutting to flashbacks during Bloom’s childhood in IRA-occupied Ireland that, ironically, add excess weight. While there is ultimately a reason as to why they’re included, aside from giving Herself star Clare Dunne a few moments to shine in an otherwise underwritten role, they nonetheless disrupt the much more concise tone and pace in the present, often feeling as though an entirely different movie is suddenly taking over from the one that you’re supposed to be watching. It’d be hard to say that they could have been cut entirely, as you would ultimately miss an important piece of character-centric information, but at the very least they could have been worked into the film better than they are, or even in a way where they don’t feel quite as random.

That aside, The Cut is perhaps one of the most intense and horrifying sports movies since Foxcatcher, one that may well forever ruin the training montage for viewers who always wanted to see more of that demanding process.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Cut explores an intense side to the typical sports-movie training montage with a nightmarish angle from filmmaker Sean Ellis, who also directs Orlando Bloom to a career-best transformative lead performance.