Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A promising teenage dancer enrolls at a prestigious ballet school while grappling with her gender dysphoria.
Lukas Dhont's debut feature is visually exquisite, with close, intimate camerawork that places the viewer inside Lara's physical and emotional experience. Victor Polster delivers a remarkably mature, physically demanding performance that anchors the film entirely. The subject matter — a trans teenage girl training intensively in ballet — is handled with unusual specificity and sensitivity, giving the film a genuinely singular identity. The plot itself is somewhat linear and inevitably builds toward crisis without fully complicating its dramatic logic, and the ending, while viscerally impactful, feels slightly abrupt and leaves the aftermath underexplored.