Marty Supreme: Cinematic Trance

 

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect. And that’s good if you know how to handle uncertainty, something many people can’t stand these days. A motivational movie about a shoe salesman who becomes a world ping pong champion? It sounded like the kind of film I’d never go see.

But let’s remember: The Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems was a massive, spectacular film, a visceral experience that left audiences breathless. Hard to describe for those not used to intense, visceral cinema, that controlled vertigo feeling that only great directors can provoke. However, the Safdies decided to go their separate creative ways, and although Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine raised huge expectations, in the end mixed reviews and some audience disdain buried it. This happened even though many pointed out that Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, would deliver the performance of the year.

The question inevitably echoed: Could The Smashing Machine be better than Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler? Impossible. End of discussion. Comparisons are awful, but they work. They help us map cinematic territories, understand creative genealogies.

So I thought: A movie about ping pong? Hmm… I don’t know. Although Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, set in the world of tennis tournaments, had been quite good, even brilliant at moments. Guadagnino had directed Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All, a harrowing film about cannibals that reminded me of Larry Clark’s movies, that dirty realism, that radical discomfort.

Chalamet’s risky strategy of choosing detestable characters, that was the connection I needed. Chalamet now in Marty Supreme, from the other Safdie brother, Josh? Okay, let’s give it a chance.

I can’t say Marty Supreme was a total surprise. Good Time and Uncut Gems were films designed to provoke pure anxiety, placing detestable characters trampling everyone to achieve their goals, making terrible decisions while frantically running through New York streets. Did someone say Martin Scorsese? Did someone say the Coen brothers? It was clear that Marty Supreme couldn’t stray too far from that premise.

And the reality is, I wasn’t wrong.

A spectacular film with an omnipresent Chalamet: always there, at every moment, laughing, playing ping pong, running, crying, executing dark comedy with surgical precision, while the camera chases him in a hallucinatory way under Josh Safdie’s masterful direction. It’s evident that Chalamet perfectly understood the monumental scale of the film he was getting into. He prepared for years for the role and even served as a producer on the film, investing not just his talent but his creative and professional capital.

Marty Supreme is a supreme experience in contemporary cinema. Scorsese would be proud of this film, in fact, he’d probably study it with admiration. We’re facing a story that moves forward frenetically and unstoppable: violent, funny, dramatic, hypnotic.

Gwyneth Paltrow appears in an almost metaphysical role, playing an actress with a glorious past who desperately seeks to return to her years of glory. Her presence adds a layer of sophisticated melancholy that contrasts perfectly with Chalamet’s overflowing energy.

But let’s talk about the soundtrack, because here Safdie breaks astonishingly with the conventional timeline. The film is set in the 1950s, while the music deliberately places us in the 1980s, with tracks from Tears for Fears, New Order, Alphaville, and Peter Gabriel. Safdie would confess his obsession with Peter Gabriel while writing the film. This temporal clash isn’t accidental or whimsical, it’s pure narrative, the way the past and future dialogue in our emotional memory.

There’s also music from the incredible Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, which further contributes to the anxiety and achieves an almost hypnotic state. Is Safdie trying to put us in a trance, as the legendary Werner Herzog sought to do in the ’70s? The answer seems to be a resounding yes.

Safdie takes even greater risks with this explosive experiment that elegantly walks the line between absolute disaster and ends up being a chaotic triumph. It includes non actors like Kevin O’Leary, one of the “sharks” from Shark Tank, which is absolutely brilliant and risky. It features the brutal filmmaker Abel Ferrara as a low level mobster who seems straight out of his own movies, another perfect metaphysical nod.

We also have a mind blowing Tyler, The Creator as the protagonist Marty Mauser’s best friend, and real life ping pong champion Koto Kawaguchi, who had no idea who the Safdies or Chalamet were before the film. This mix of professionals and novices creates a unique texture, an authenticity that can’t be manufactured in any acting lab.

It’s said that the real life character the film is based on, Marty Reisman, was a showman in the ’50s and ’60s who played dramatically and exaggeratedly, gaining fame through bizarre bets during his matches. He was a natural showman, a Dickensian character in the Eisenhower era.

And here’s what’s fascinating: the clash between an ’80s soundtrack and a film set in the ’50s isn’t coincidental. Rainer Werner Fassbinder did something similar in his TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz, set in the 1920s but with Kraftwerk music. The past chasing the future, and the future chasing the past.

O’Leary’s character, Milton Rockwell, as subtly revealed in the plot, is a vampire who has existed across various eras. In an alternate ending that circulated in pre production rumors, Rockwell would encounter Mauser and his granddaughter at a Tears for Fears concert in the ’80s, hence the band’s iconic track at the end of the film. This metaphysical layer could have elevated the movie beyond the conventional, but Safdie reconsidered, thinking the script twist would be too much for audiences.

Marty Supreme is a supreme journey through the world of image and movement at full speed. A powerful bet, in the style of Marty Mauser, to become the best film of 2025. Josh Safdie has proven that Good Time and Uncut Gems weren’t lucky flukes or happy accidents, they’re the confirmation of a consistent auteur vision that knows how to provoke an audience and leave them anything but indifferent. Could this be the start of a lasting partnership between Chalamet and Safdie, like what happened before with Robert De Niro and Scorsese?