Marty Supreme (2025)
For years, I've been saying that Oscar Isaac is this generation's Al Pacino. After sitting through Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, I'm ready to eat those words whole and hand that mantle straight to Timothée Chalamet. This is, and I don't say this lightly, the Scarface of the table tennis world.
I went in completely blind, though the deafening critical acclaim had me bracing for something special. What I got was a brilliant, white-knuckle ride that takes the raw, obsessive energy Chalamet showed in Beautiful Boy and Call Me by Your Name and cranks it up to an absolutely terrifying next level. He has always had the tools. Here, he uses all of them at once, and the result is something genuinely staggering to watch.
The film is a brutal character study on the single-mindedness of youth. It wraps brashness, pride, stupidity, and sheer selfishness into one firmly unlikeable protagonist. Marty is an absolute nightmare to be around, and yet you cannot look away. That is not an easy trick to pull off for two and a half hours, but Safdie manages it because the tension is wound so impossibly tight that the runtime practically disappears. You surface at the end feeling wrung out, blinking back into the real world, wondering how that much time just evaporated.
Safdie is clearly drawing from the same well of controlled panic that made Uncut Gems (2019) such a visceral, suffocating experience. There is that same claustrophobic atmosphere, that same sense that every story beat is arriving slightly too fast, slightly too close. Every sequence feels like a relentless gut punch. It is exhausting in the best possible way, the kind of exhausting that tells you a film has genuinely got under your skin.
The ensemble cast does a cracking job of orbiting Chalamet's black hole of a performance, though I do have one significant gripe. Odessa A'zion is brilliant, full stop, and the film simply does not give her enough to do. Her role deserved to be considerably larger, and every scene she is in makes you acutely aware of the ones she is absent from. It is the closest the picture comes to a genuine flaw, and it is worth naming.
Where Marty Supreme truly ascends into its own stratosphere is the audio. Daniel Lopatin needs to take a massive bow for this one. The soundtrack is a triumph, and a genuinely strange one: an oddly placed but utterly outstanding selection of synth-heavy eighties tracks laid over a story set in the late forties and early fifties. It should not work. It absolutely does. The music alongside the pulsing score during the more kinetic sequences creates something that perfectly marries the visual chaos on screen. That marriage, that specific, unlikely combination, is what pushes this from a very good four-star picture into something that lingers well after you leave the theatre.
It is not a flawless film. Odessa A'zion's underuse is a real missed opportunity, and there will be viewers who find Marty's relentless awfulness more grating than gripping. But those are minor complaints against a picture that is so agonisingly close to perfect that they barely register in the grand scheme. Safdie and Chalamet have made something deeply immersive, brilliantly scored, and unapologetically stressful. It completely justifies the hype surrounding it.
Four and a half stars. Fantastic, deeply rewarding, and absolutely exhausting. Go see it.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-07-19
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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