SXSW Review: “Pretty Lethal”

Pretty Lethal (Vicky Jewson, 2026) 1½ out of 5 stars

In the new film Pretty Lethal, director Vicky Jewson (Close) and screenwriter Kate Freund have put together a would-be kick-ass women-centered action flick where a group of underdog ballerinas get the better of their abusers. And in a few exciting and fun sequences, they succeed in their goal. Unfortunately, what surrounds those moments is almost excruciatingly vacuous (and, if one were Hungarian, very offensive), reducing the overall effectiveness of what remains.

The aforementioned dancers are in a troupe of five American teens, trained by a British teacher. They are “Bones” (Maddie Ziegler, The Fallout), “Princess” (Lana Condor, To All the Boys I Loved Before: Always and Forever), Grace (Avantika, the 2024 Mean Girls), Zoe (Iris Apatow, Young Werther), and Zoe’s younger sister, Chloe (Millicent Simmonds, A Quiet Place Part II). Their coach is Miss Thorna (Lydia Leonard, Northern Comfort). Though they barely get along, the girls are on their way to Budapest, the capital of Hungary, for a ballet competition.

With hardly any time to establish character, we find ourselves on a small road in the Hungarian countryside, on a bus in the process of breaking down. Why our protagonists could not just fly into Budapest, which has a nice airport, is never explained. This script decision immediately places them in jeopardy, however, and forces the young women to hoof it to the nearest habitation, which just happens to be a castle-like structure in the middle of nowhere. It’s also a bar and headquarters to one faction of the criminal underworld, ruled over by a woman named Devora (Uma Thurman, The Old Guard 2). She, as it turns out, is a former ballerina.

Sadly, that fact does not guarantee the dancers’ safety, and they soon discover that this backwater dump is filled with folks (mostly gross men, though Freund makes an appearance as one of the few additional women) who do not wish them well. In order to survive, they will have to overcome their dysfunctional dynamic and battle for their lives. Along the way, a plié and/or arabesque or two might help.

I wanted to like this. The premise promises fight scenes with intriguing choreography. And we do get that, but too rarely. The rest of the time is spent lamenting the dearth of meaningful setup, the one-dimensional villains, and the over-the-top performances by most involved (Thurman, especially).

There is no attempt to ground any of this in anything remotely close to authentically Hungarian (the accents are all over the place, which is the least of the problems), recalling the Eurotrash aesthetic of Eli Roth’s Hostelfilms (ostensibly set in Slovakia, but not really) and nothing more. Ask yourself the slightest question about plot details and it all falls apart. Pretty Lethal is, sadly, pretty silly, and not in the way that makes one have a good time throughout.

[Following its SXSW 2026 Premiere, Pretty Lethal will release on Amazon Prime on March 25.]

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.