Josh Safdie’s and Timothée Chalamet’s highly anticipated Marty Supreme is an exciting, adrenaline-fuelled watch, but one that feels somewhat incomplete. There is much to enjoy here, not least Chalamet’s totally devoted performance – which holds together the whirlwind of chaos and misfortune that defines the rest of the movie – and the film’s climax delivers a satisfying enough catharsis to make the build-up of anxiety and stress all worth it, but the film, I believe, is missing something to make it a fully well-rounded whole.
Safdie handles the pacing of the movie very well, keeping its momentum constantly moving forward with rarely a moment’s pause for breath – an impressive feat for a movie of two and a half hours. Watching it, you feel as though you’ve been grabbed by the collar and are being dragged along after Marty (Chalamet) and only as the credits role are you finally released and allowed to breathe normally once again. Consequently, the film justifies its lengthy runtime as it never feels as though it is dragging, nor do any of the scenes feel particularly overly drawn out or unnecessary. The table tennis scenes in particular, though not as interesting as the tennis scenes in 2024’s Challengers, are gripping, and Safdie doesn’t allow them to go on too long which is much to the film’s advantage. These scenes, along with the rest, benefit greatly from Chalamet’s passionate, explosive performance. His charismatic bringing to life of Marty Mauser saturates each scene with a passion and an energy that is greatly required in such a film, for he makes each moment feel like a matter of life and death, like a great cry from the heart, and without such a stellar act at its centre Marty Supreme could well have fallen flat. Chalamet is certainly a talent who appears to have no ceiling.
But outside of Chalamet who, I do believe, is probably flawless in this role, Marty Supreme has its problems. For a start, there are several characters who are introduced with great promise only to either be sidelined before any real connection with them can be made, or who become merely two-dimensional plot devices. Take Dion for instance, played in a debut by Luke Manley. Dion had the chance to offer some real heart to the film as the sensitive, supportive, and ultimately neglected friend and business partner to Marty, and in occasional moments – such as when he lets Marty and Rachel stay over at his parents’ house despite his better judgement – he almost brings this to the scene; and his not succeeding in doing so isn’t a fault of Manley’s, who shows promise as having the potential to draw the necessary sympathy from an audience required to turn these scenes more sensitive. Rather, the fault is with Safdie who brushes over Dion’s mistreatment and resulting frustrations, treating them as a quick, comic gag before moving on and leaving Dion all but forgotten about, and his potential as an emotional or moral core in the film unrealised.
This same issue presents itself many times throughout Marty Supreme. The film proposes to be about the relentless struggle to fulfil a dream and the sacrifices one must make in order to achieve it. Yet, despite the several hardships that befall Marty, he never has to make any genuine sacrifices that would make his quest for this dream ring with a little more meaning and profundity. Kevin O’Leary, who plays Marty’s nemesis Milon Rockwell in the movie, has recently been quoted as saying that he felt unsatisfied with the ending of Marty Supreme for, in his eyes, as a consequence of his treatment of everybody else in the film, Marty should have to ‘live a life in misery in perpetuity’ (from Ethan Shanfeld’s interview with Kevin O’Leary for Variety). While I disagree that the problem lies specifically with the ending of the film – for Chalamet delivers a wonderful closing shot reminiscent of that ending almost a decade earlier in Call Me by Your Name – I think O’Leary’s sentiment is correct, which is that Marty Supreme suffers because of a lack of consequences for its protagonist’s actions. Many, many things go wrong for Marty and the host of characters around him (whether friends, family, lovers, enemies, or total strangers), but they never go wrong for long. Marty’s actions lead to bystanders being stabbed, gas stations going up in a ball of flames, people being beaten or betrayed. But once these moments have happened, they aren’t given another thought, the consequences are never shown, and as such Marty’s actions carry no real weight. Take Tyler, the Creator’s Wally, for instance. Marty drags him along through a series of dangerous mishaps, almost getting him beat up and leaving his car (his means of income) a wreck, only for Marty to cheat him at the end of it all, leaving him downtrodden and betrayed. But the next time we see Wally? He’s all smiles and waves; all is forgiven, it’s like it never happened. Even the most long-lasting impact of one of Marty’s selfish escapades, this time in the guise of Abel Ferrara’s elderly criminal Ezra Mishkin, is a man who apparently doesn’t think twice about stabbing a stranger in a busy New York street and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a pregnant woman if it suited his best interests. He’s not a man who draws our sympathy nor someone whose outcome we care a great deal about, and as a result Marty’s reckless actions in pursuit of his dream once more carry almost no real consequences.
The whole way through Marty Supreme there is great opportunity for some real commentary to be made on the costs of pursuing greatness, but by the film’s end Marty has everything he had at the film’s beginning, plus more, and anyone he ran down during his journey has either recovered or long been forgotten about. Marty never really loses anything, and anyone who does suffer because of him isn’t awarded enough character development to garner a long-lasting emotional reaction from the audience. The film’s climax is certainly an exhilarating one, and Chalamet bursts with emotion, but there isn’t this other, darker, lonely side to it to really leave the lasting impact that perhaps Marty Supreme thinks it has. So, while there are some genuinely unexpected and quite brutal moments (that bath scene, for instance), the lack of weight carried by these moments in the long run means that they never become anything more than a bit of exciting spectacle, a fun set piece to keep the story moving forwards. It is with this that I think Marty Supreme finds its main source of weakness.
I suppose this ties in with my more general criticisms of A24 as a whole, in particular the apparent belief held by the studio that some graphic and explicit – potentially shocking in the moment – surface material is sufficient to make a film bold and daring, to make it avant garde. But more often than not with A24, these surface-level displays are mere decoration on a body of work otherwise essentially the same as all the rest. As a consequence, these moments don’t leave a lasting impression once the film has finished, or really, in most cases, even just once the scene has finished. A24 has its place, and it even has some very good films, but I believe it is yet to produce a film that genuinely feels fresh, that disturbs or shocks or moves or lingers in the way a Fulci, a Jean Rollin, a Haneke, a Thomas Vinterberg, or – to name a very recent example – a Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value) do.Try as they might to add some of that European attitude, these films fall short of the mark, because though on the surface an A24 film might appear fresh, risky, or bold in comparison to a lot of what else is being released by America and the UK, ultimately this freshness very rarely goes deeper than its appearance, and in most cases even the appearance isn’t so fresh as the studio might believe.
Unfortunately for Safdie and for Marty Supreme, some toe-curling moments and several selfish decisions and outlandish comments from Marty aren’t enough to give the film the edge and the impact that I think it wishes to deliver. That said, it does offer many thrilling moments, and the comic elements work throughout as well. So, even if it treads a fairly familiar path both narratively and visually, and even if it lacks real grit in much of its bulk, it entertains, and it feels (and even looks, to an extent) fresher than a lot of its contemporaries – a potentially promising sign for A24, though I won’t be getting my hopes up. If you go into Marty Supreme wanting a stressful but otherwise easy watch, you’ll get perhaps everything that you want from it. I can’t help but wonder, though, what this film might have felt like under the direction of someone else, Alfonso Cuarón, say, who might have drawn more from the aftermath Marty leaves in his wake, giving us a film of greater complexity and emotional depth.
January 15th, 2026
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