‘Christy’ is a film of two very distinct halves – and that divide is both its theme and its biggest flaw. It tells the true story of Christy Martin, a pioneering female boxer from small-town West Virginia. Growing up queer in a deeply conservative environment, she’s pushed to hide her sexuality when her talent in the ring attracts attention. Suddenly, boxing success is conditional: she must appear straight if she wants her career to take off.

What begins almost like a tabloid sports biopic quickly takes a darker turn. Christy (Sydney Sweeney) is pressured into a relationship with a man who becomes her boxing manager – but what initially comes across as cartoonish controlling behaviour gradually reveals a far more chilling reality. The second half of the film becomes a survival thriller, as Christy faces brutal, escalating abuse. There’s a horrifying sequence in which she’s stabbed several times and then shot – yet still finds the strength to escape.

And even then, what’s devastating is the response of those closest to her. Her own family assume she must have provoked the violence. The film powerfully captures how homophobia and outdated ideas about marriage allowed abuse to flourish unchecked – better, they think, to have an abusive husband than to love another woman.

Sydney Sweeney delivers a fierce central performance, and the story itself – a woman breaking barriers in a male-dominated sport while privately fighting for her life – should feel triumphant. But the film never quite brings those strands together. Instead of showing how Christy’s battles inside the ring mirrored the violence she faced at home – in the tradition of ‘Raging Bull’ – it treats them as separate stories that don’t fully connect.

Her boxing victories appear oddly detached from her personal suffering, and because the abusive husband is initially presented as almost comically buffoonish, the tonal shift can feel jarring. We don’t see the chemistry between them, so their marriage feels bafflingly sudden – and we’re left longing for more insight into what kept her trapped for so long.

There is a compelling film here: about talent smothered, identity denied, and the way an entire culture failed to protect a woman until she almost lost her life. And the fact that Christy Martin herself has been closely involved in the project gives it the weight of personal reckoning.

But at over two hours, the storytelling feels repetitive, stretched too thin, and unwilling to interrogate the deeper emotional paradox – that a boxer could be celebrated for her toughness publicly while being broken privately by the very person meant to protect her.

‘Christy’ is an important story – but one that deserved a more unified punch.