The Cut

They it’s not the winning but the taking part that counts. Sometimes, getting to the stage where one can take part is the real battle, and in some sports, it can be dangerous.

When we first meet our unnamed hero (Orlando Bloom), who is listed in the credits simply as ‘Boxer’, he is fighting in what appears to be the last match of his life. A blow to the head leaves a nasty cut above his eye. He’s staggering. The referee has to step in, bringing it to an end. He’s had a decent run, but he’s going to have to accept that it’s over.

Skip forward a few years. The boxer is running a gym with his partner Caitlin (Caitríona Balfe), a former fighter herself. They seem well adjusted, happy. There’s a lightness about them and a resilience that enables them to blow off the provocation and misogynistic abuse that comes from teenage boys trying to prove themselves. She seems to understand his past, as the child of a famous fighter who ignored her talent in favour of her brothers, and as a former addict. The discipline of the gym helps her and she has good people around her, but for her man it’s a little different – or so he will claim. He has unfinished business, and when an offer comes along, he’s ready to forsake pretty much everything else in order to pursue it.

It goes like this: he’s not safe fighting as a middleweight anymore, but an opportunity has arisen to challenge the super welterweight title holder. There’s big money on offer. It could make their lives a lot easier, but she knows that’s not what it’s about. The problem is that he’s significantly over that weight. To make the cut, he’ll need to undertake an intensive weight loss programme. He’ll need absolute discipline. In comes trainer Boz (John Turturro), whom he chooses expressly because he needs to surrender himself to the control of someone for whom that is the only goal – someone who doesn’t care if he lives or dies.

Though anyone who has trained hard for any sport will find a lot to relate to here, you won’t need to be a sports fan to get something out of it. It’s not really about boxing. It’s about the drive to go to extremes, and the complex psychological factors which can be involved in that. In the boxer’s case, these are illustrated through a series of flashbacks to an incident in his childhood which also address aspects of recent Irish history. The very specific pressures pertaining to Irish understandings of masculinity are brought to bear, ad over time we come to understand the source of his desperate need to feel in control.

What he’s doing is incredibly dangerous. He faces not just the slow onset damage of starvation, but the dramatic metabolic upsets triggered by such a dramatic change, as he eats protein and fat but nothing else and works out and sweats continually. Extreme dehydration means losing control of his body temperature. He also loses control of his emotions and starts blacking out. For anyone who doesn’t understand this, a background news item early in the film, about a boxer’s death from dehydration, provides context.

It’s a known problem in the sport, and we see something of the corruption that enables it, as well as the black market in pharmaceuticals used very much contrary to their intended purpose. There is an additional layer of irony inherent in addressing the issue in a film, given that the other context in which men resort to these high risk methods is modelling and acting. Hollywood’s idea of male beauty has a lot to answer for.

A world away from Hollywood now, Bloom shines in the small independent films that seem to be his first choice, and this is no exception. Balfe, too, is superb, and of course Turturro has no difficulty holding his own. The result is a powerful three-hander that builds to a shocking conclusion. One hopes that it will successfully reach out beyond the sports film bracket, because it’s deserving of a wide audience.

Reviewed on: 05 Sep 2025