‘Pretty Lethal’ Review: Ballet Meets Brutal Action in a Stylish but Uneven Genre Mashup
A dysfunctional ballet troupe is forced to take shelter when their bus breaks down enroute to a prestigious competition and must use their training to fight back when a gang of armed men target them.
When people say action scenes are choreographed like a ballet, no one expects something quite like this. In Pretty Lethal, that idea is taken literally. It’s not just about carefully arranging bodies in space to suggest fluid movement—it is a ballet. The twist is that the protagonists fighting for their lives are dancers. Lacking brute strength, they rely on what they know best: movement, precision, legs, arms, and sheer agility to outmaneuver—and take down—men twice their size.
Pretty Lethal isn’t a musical—though it easily could have been—but rather an action film with a horror edge. It leans less into outright scares than into the visceral impact of kicks and blows. Director Vicky Jewson embraces the absurdity of the premise instead of trying to ground it, and that choice gives the film a playful, self-aware tone. Yes, a small group of five American ballet dancers ends up facing off against a couple dozen Hungarian thugs—and they do it using the same skills they’d bring to The Nutcracker.
The setup comes early, as we meet the five dancers and their instructor preparing for a competition at the National Theatre in Budapest. There’s Bones (Maddie Ziegler), Princess (Lana Condor), Grace (Avantika), Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), and Zoe (Iris Apatow), all under the watchful eye of their teacher Thorna (Lydia Leonard). Tensions run high within the group, especially between the narcissistic, entitled Princess and pretty much everyone else. Grace is devoutly religious, Zoe looks after her hearing-impaired sister Chloe, and Bones—true to her name—is the toughest of the bunch, coming from a humbler background and carrying a chip on her shoulder.
Naturally, everything goes wrong on the trip. Their flight is diverted, the bus to Budapest breaks down, and the group ends up trekking through the woods until they stumble upon a remote mansion doubling as a bar and restaurant. It’s run by the imposing Devora (Uma Thurman), who—coincidentally or not—was once a dancer herself. The place is filled with drunk, hostile men who make it clear the girls are not welcome. Things escalate quickly: violence erupts, Thorna is killed, and the dancers are forced into a desperate fight for survival, mostly within the mansion and its surrounding grounds.
From there, Pretty Lethal plays like a mash-up of Hostel and Suspiria: a barrage of violent set pieces unfolding in an eerie Eastern European estate populated by unpleasant characters, with motives that remain murky for much of the runtime. Amid the chaos, the dancers realize that unity—both literal and metaphorical—is their greatest weapon, and that the discipline drilled into them in class might just save their lives.
Once the girls start taking down their attackers with swift turns and razor-sharp kicks, the action becomes gleefully ridiculous, and the film leans into that comedic absurdity. It’s when the plot tries to take itself seriously—offering clunky explanations about what’s really going on—that things falter. There isn’t much depth to uncover there. Thurman’s role is relatively small, but her presence—and her finely tuned Eastern European accent—provides a kind of anchor, even as the film’s emotional weight rests largely on the volatile frenemies dynamic between Ziegler and Condor.
There’s something amusing about Pretty Lethal arriving at the same moment as Timothée Chalamet’s viral comments about the supposed irrelevance of dance. Jewson’s film won’t settle that debate, but it does make a case—however tongue-in-cheek—that even the smallest, most delicate dancers can become formidable fighters, even action heroes. And whether one buys into that or not, that feels oddly relevant in today’s cinematic landscape.
