‘Agon’ review: Intriguing Italian debut follows three sportswomen at a fictional Olympics

Written and directed by: Giulio Bertelli. ItalyUSA/France. 2025. 100mins

Italian filmmaker Giulio Bertelli’s debut joins the small but expanding arthouse niche of the alternative sports movie. Oblique yet intriguing, this documentary-infused drama, which premiered in Venice’s Critics Week, intertwines the stories of three Italian sportswomen who have all chosen Olympic disciplines – judo, fencing, rifle shooting – that originated in violence: in war, duelling or self-defence. 

Agon feels a little cerebral, wary of engaging with its characters

Agon (which takes its title from the Ancient Greek word for a struggle, contest or competition) depicts these women competing in a fictional live-streamed global sports tournament called Ludoj. But each will fail in some crucial way when close to glory. How athletes deal with failure in a system that worships success is one of Bertelli’s themes – one of many rippling beneath Agon’s free-form surface.

Another theme, of digital distraction, is built into the structure of the film, with the drama frequently interrupted by smartphone footage, video games and more; something which could help it play well with culturally adventurous millennials and Gen Z-ers. Mubi must be hoping so: they’re giving it a limited Italian theatrical release on August 29, a first for the company in this territory. Elsewhere, Agon could deliver some arthouse sales for The Match Factory – it may be an acquired taste but, with its spare dialogue (mostly in Italian but with some English) and blend of edgy visual and auditory textures, its appeal should not be limited to Italy.

Bertelli, the younger son of fashion power couple Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, has spent much of his adult life as a professional yachtsman. But, judging by this film, he also seems to have an affinity with the increasingly conceptual approach of the Fondazione Prada, the contemporary art institution presided over by his mother. His debut is brimming with different techniques and styles including surgical sequences (some of them challenging for the squeamish), first-person shooter game footage, clips of sports equipment manufacturing and stress-testing, animation, thermal imaging and blurry smartphone videos.

There are shades of the Jonathan Glazer of Under the Skin, but Agon does not feel derivative. What it does feel is a little cerebral, rather wary of engaging too deeply with its characters. The effect is both alienating and refreshing. Real life Italian Olympic and world champion judoka Alice Bellandi plays a character who bears her name, but we suspect is not quite her (the real Bellandi is known for her exuberance, whereas this one is caught up in a world of pain that seems to derive only partly from a recurring knee injury). Fencer Giovanna Falconetti and shooting champion Alex Sokolov are played respectively by actors Yile Vianello and Sofija Zobina, who both featured in Alice Rohrwacher’s recent arthouse hit La Chimera.

The women’s trainers are demonic shadows whose job it is to administer mysterious powders, or hold them underwater during apnea training. Only Alice is seen spending any time with fellow athletes, and then it’s to bitch about others. The fragmented narrative deftly intertwines the three stories, but the three women meet only thematically.

Agon suggests that elite sportswomen – or sportspeople in general – live in a kind of fugue state in which everything outside of the moment of struggle – the ‘agon’ – is not quite real, a place in which past and future get mixed up. Alex is hostage to a video that has gone viral, charting something she did in her ‘civilian’ life that has come back to bite her. We cut from the footage of this error of judgement, committed in a snowy Arctic landscape, to scenes of a swordfish being sliced up in a fish market – a sequence explained only in part, a little later, when we see Giovanna ordering a seafood dinner.

Bertelli’s debut excels at these slippages, but is less convincing as a straight-up drama. Mostly, the performances of the three leads are deliberately muted (in one nightclub scene the dialogue is all but inaudible) so the few moments when they become actorly feel like they have landed from another film. Maybe that’s why it’s Bellandi, the non-actress, who exerts the strongest grip.