Amazon Prime's Pretty Lethal: Makes No Sense, Is No Fun

You’re driving home from school with your mom, and you find yourself craving  a movie. A particular kind of movie, in fact – an atmospheric horror-thriller about dancers. And then, there it is! You see it! A billboard for Dario Argento’s 1977 classic, Suspiria!

”Mom,” you ask, “can we go see Suspiria?”

”No, honey,” she says, “we have Suspiria at home.”

You pull into the driveway of your house and race to the DVD player. You see the movie!. The disc has already been inserted, and it’s Amazon Prime’s new made-for-streaming action film, Pretty Lethal (2026). This is Suspiria at home.

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

Pretty Lethal opens with its diverse cast in their Los Angeles dance studio, as the group of dancers (who all hate each other) attempt to practice their routine. They bump into each other as they spin, clearly out of sync. Why do they hate each other? Well, it’s never explained much beyond the two main characters being a working-class scholarship girl, literally named Bones (Maddie Ziegler), and her rich frenemy, literally named Princess (Lana Condor). In the supporting cast are played-for-laughs Jesus freak Grace (Avantika), Deaf dancer Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), and her sister and chaperone Zoe (Iris Apatow).

Soon enough, though, the girls are in a bus in the forest, on their way to Budapest for a dance competition, when their bus breaks down. Directed by their teacher to leave the bus driver and walk, the group arrives in the rain at the mysterious Teremok Inn. (Conveniently for the film’s promotional images of the girls in bloody tutus, the main cast is forced to change into the only dry clothes they have, their white tutus, since it was raining as they walked to the inn.) Far from being a haunted house, however, the inn, despite being in the middle of the forest, is revealed to be a seedy nightclub for the henchmen of Budapest’s rival gangs. Surprise! Pretty Lethal is actually a movie about organized crime, and at the center of it all is Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman), ex-ballerina and now owner of the Teremok Inn. Devora is also apparently now a crime boss to be feared herself. How did she get into organized crime? How does she make her money? Why does she have so many henchmen? These questions are never answered – only posed – as we see Devora holding down a screaming man whose convenience to the plot I can’t even remember, branding his tongue with a T. 

Now the movie really gets going. A rival gangster of Devora named Pasha, who hangs out at her mysterious bar in the forest for some reason, tries to hit on the girls’ teacher, Miss Thorna (Lydia Leonard), only to receive a knee to the groin. Quickly, the film’s chaos begins. Despite the inscrutable web of organized crime in which the movie is set, it is merely a romantic rejection that starts the action when Pasha drunkenly shoots Miss Thorna in the head. The girls are whisked away to the basement so the villains of the film can deliberate what to do with their innocent witnesses, and the title card finally lands.

The rest of the movie is a blur of fight scenes and girlboss one-liners as the dancers must overcome their unexplained hostility towards one another and escape the hordes of henchmen at the Teremok Inn. While this kind of action plot is a solid skeleton for a story, one that classics from Die Hard to Ready or Not are built on, Pretty Lethal also tries and fails to balance comedy, girl power slogans, and themes of friendship. Before being locked in the basement, Grace is given an unidentified drug to calm down, and her hallucinations that last almost the entire runtime of the movie are played for laughs. (When one henchman attempts to rape her, his eyes transform into red bug eyes and she deliriously rebukes him as Satan.) Luckily, the girls are rallied by Bones, who points to the henchmen and declares, “these guys are drunk and out of shape, and we’re prima-fucking-ballerinas!” An extremely graphic cascade of fight scenes follows: the girls fight with switchblades tucked into their pointe shoes, a man is impaled on a bedpost, and scissors are shoved up someone’s nose, all to the music of The Nutcracker.

What passes for character development in this movie is mainly propelled by inspirational speeches from Bones, all of which seem to be targeted towards the imagined discrimination of this cruel world against ballerinas, which the movie treats like a protected class. Weirder still, the subtext of the movies seems to use ballerinas as a stand-in for women. As all the dancers but Bones lack any semblance of self-belief, the script gives her plenty of not-so-subtle motivational speeches to her fellow dancers about how “people assume we’re these fragile little things, but we’re not. We perform sick, bleeding, all while keeping a smile on our faces, so don’t tell me you’re not strong, okay?” It’s giving those cringey millennial feminist quotes about how women are stronger than men because they do it all, but backwards and in high heels. It may be true that ballerinas, and women for that matter, live in a perpetual state of gritted teeth and performative smiles, but the movie doesn’t ever use its extremely gendered setting of the ballet world to question why exactly women are in this predicament. Instead, the gendered violence that women and ballerinas suffer is, in the logic of this movie, to their credit. It is because of their suffering, their training, and their aptitude for performance that the girls of Pretty Lethal can smile and laugh as Devora’s ethnically ambiguous henchman The Doktor tortures Bones by pulling her toenails out. She’s used to it, she explains to him, laughing maniacally. She breaks toenails all the time, peels them off, and just keeps of dancing because she’s a “balle-fucking-rina.”

But what about diversity in the movie? After all, if you’re reading Incluvie, you’re here because you care about representation in film. Despite Pretty Lethal’s diverse ensemble cast, its flaws deny the film the ability to be aspirational for girls anywhere. Moreover, the way Pretty Lethal interacts with disability is incredibly strange. From the start, the film sidelines its most interesting character, Deaf dancer Chloe, by separating her from the group when she has to go to the bathroom. For the first half of the movie, she sits in Devora’s office without a care in the world, watching black and white movies, eating popcorn, and making out with her teammates’ kidnapper, Devora’s son. While the movie does the bare minimum by hiring an actual Deaf actress to play a Deaf character, the same cannot be said for Devora. 

At the climax of the movie, where the rest of the dancers have escaped but Bones remains in Devora’s grasp, Devora puts on an old tutu from the glass case in her office and reveals that the chaos that has ensued from Pasha’s shooting of Miss Thorna was merely a convenient stroke of luck. For years, Devora had been trying to lure Pasha’s father to the inn, desperate to stop paying him protection money. Video of his son shooting a woman in the head is somehow just the blackmail she needs, and she is finally able to summon Pasha’s father Lothar to the inn and reveal in a dramatic speech that it was Devora’s own father who first had to pay protection money to Lothar, and when he couldn’t pay, Lothar decided to cut off his daughter’s leg, which the camera pans over to show that Devora keeps it in a glass specimen jar. Viewers are treated to a shot of Devora standing in a circle of mirrors, her middle aged face painted white like the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy that her amputation prevented her from playing in her youth. She stands inspecting her face, the camera zooming out to show her metal leg. Devora is just the latest grotesque, evil amputee played by an abled actress to grace the screen, and by this point in the movie, she’s holding a bomb. Because yes, after all of it – after the kidnapping, the torture, the drugging, the attempted rape, and the cutesy girl power slogans – the movie ends when Devora blows up the Inn, Lothar, and herself, and the dancers steal the henchmen’s motorcycles to ride off to Budapest.

Pretty Lethal is a film that almost does a lot. It’s almost a movie critiquing the horrors of professional ballet, almost a mob movie, almost a horror thriller, and almost a camp comedy. It’s also almost a convenient entry in your favorite streaming service’s “viewers also liked” list that comes up after you watch Suspiria. With creepy ballet-themed scenery and dance-world-in-joke throwaway lines, the movie gestures vaguely at feminist ideas, but in the end blows itself up – literally.