During the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, I caught a couple live TV broadcasts of women’s fencing matches, expecting to watch some good old-fashioned swordfighting from world-class athletes. It turns out, modern fencing looks a lot more like retro sci-fi B-movies than the Old Hollywood swashbucklers I was picturing. I expected the competitors to be protected by masks & padding, sure; I just didn’t expect them to be plugged into electronic sensors, with each of their scores marked by lights & beeps when they completed a circuit with their foils, seemingly making the on-site referees just as vestigial as they are in the WWE. The new Italo arthouse headscratcher Agon presents the first cinematic instance I know of where modern, computerized fencing is represented at length onscreen, no longer relegated to bi-annual Olympic sports broadcasts. In fact, the sci-fi futurism of modern sports is just about the only thing on first-time writer-director Giulio Bertelli’s mind, as he spends Agon‘s entire runtime pondering & cataloging the various machines that have transformed the Olympic Games into an uncanny, inhuman abstraction rather than a straightforward demonstration of pure athletic prowess. It’s a surprisingly alienating, dissociative approach to the sports-movie formula, boldly announcing that the techno future of the sports drama is here, and it is terrifying.

In a semi-documentary style, we watch three women train & compete in various combat sports for a fictionalized version of the Olympics called The Ludoj Games. One is a fencer, who is physically plugged into the various computer sensors that have gradually transformed the sport into a live-action video game. Another is a sharpshooter, who is convinced that her own sport will become a literal video game in the near future, replacing traditional firearms with laser rifles. The third is a judo fighter, who you’d think would be safe from the encroachment of computer electronics in her sport, except that every aspect of her training and bodily maintenance requires high-grade, cutting-edge medical tech. Watching these women work at their craft is both chilling & beautiful, literalizing the ways that athletes’ bodies are precisely calibrated machines by surrounding them with endlessly bizarre, precisely calibrated machines. They hone their skills in abstract video game simulations. They measure their lung performance on treadmills by wearing Darth Vader-style breath masks. They reveal hidden injuries through X-rays & MRIs. They relieve stress between matches by streaming hentai on their smartphones. The entire film plays like a high-end version of those brain-rot video compilations of “satisfying factory machines,” minimizing the athletes’ bodies to an organic product of highly coordinated industrial processing.

Beyond its pronounced fetishism for the modern tech of sports medicine, Agon seems particularly interested in the exact tipping point where the simulated violence of combat sports turns into actual, physical harm. Very early on, our buff judo fighter suffers a painful knee injury, and we watch surgeons reconstruct her newly bionic body in intense documentary gore before she attempts to rehab her way back to the top of her field. Soon after, the sharpshooter lands in hot water with her financial sponsors over amoral hunting practices she’s engaged in outside the games, effectively transgressing by using her instrument for the exact purpose it was initially designed for – give or take her choice of target. It’s initially unclear what the fencer’s personal crisis with unstimulated violence could possibly be, and then it turns out she’s got it the worst out of the trio (especially once it’s revealed in the end credits that her own tragedy is inspired by a real-life freak event in the sport’s recent past). When the sharpshooter complains to an official representative of the games that she’s being professionally punished for her private behavior, the rep shoots back that, “There’s no room for violence here.” That’s a little rich, considering that the only sports profiled here are all simulations of violence, more military exercise than wholesome pastime.

When our psuedo-violent, semi-computerized athletes finally compete in The Ludoj Games, there is no live audience on hand to witness their technical achievements & failures. The games are staged in an abstracted black-box void, only to be witnessed by on-site officials, expensive camera rigs, and the all-important digital sensors. Obviously, this choice is at least partially driven by budgetary restraints, but Bertelli finds a way to make that limitation emphasize the cold post-humanism of modern Olympic sports. His interest in the subject appears to be somewhat personal, too, considering his advertised background in offshore sailing and, subsequently, the production of offshore sailing equipment. Not for nothing, but Bertelli also has familial ties to the fashion-industry royalty of Prada & Miu Miu, which is a dynasty he has attempted to professionally distance himself from but still shows in his filmmaking style. There’s a couture streetwear coolness in the way his three athletes model their sports’ various far-out gadgets, even as Bertelli dwells on the uglier, grotesque aspects of modern Olympic physicality. The movie is overall just as hip & fashionable as it is alienating & disorienting. Even the title “Agon” reads like the name of a fictional fashion brand, despite its intended academia as the Greek word for “conflict,” once used to describe the ancient, pre-computerized Olympics, BC.

-Brandon Ledet