The sports movie usually conforms to genre. The training montage, gruff but dedicated coach, slow-mo shots of the straining body, the triumphant final victory before a screaming crowd. But by contrast, Giulio Bertelli’s Agon (2025) is a film about sports that, instead, shows that contemporary professional athleticism is a profoundly
cybernetic process, where the isolated body is only one node in a wider technological apparatus.

The film follows three female athletes, specialising in judo, fencing and shooting, as they prepare to participate in the fictional 2024 Ludoj Games. The Games are televised, so the competition in Agon takes place in silent rooms instead of crowds. Bertelli has described the film as “technorealism”, which describes both this weird reality and the film’s narrative structure, at times more like a documentary than a feature film. The unblinking camera follows the athletes hunched over phones in airports, watching performances back or just scrolling; they train and rest, rest and train, looking intently into the screens that have supplanted sport’s old communal theatre. Throughout the film, there are hardly any shots of people looking at each other.

Agon opens with a quote from the 1892 manifesto by Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic Games: “Gymnasts must perpetually be under a warlike influence. The idea of war must never cease to inspire them.” All three of the sports derive from forms of combat, but in the film, the only moment of real violence is accidental. As these athletes feed, starve, ice, heat and bind their bodies, this is a reminder that fate still holds its freakish power. Sport’s strange existential drama – the force of will versus chance, the gruelling training versus the random injury – is exemplified in one long, disgusting surgery scene, where human flesh contrasts with the dull hardware on display for most of the film. Here, the attention is held by the surgeon, in his silently absorbing work. It’s a display of skilled yet intimate care, that is deeply – and viscerally – moving. .