The Brooklyn Rail

There is no ballerina in Ballerina, and not much ballet. There is a creaky snow globe that cranks out that famous melancholic melody from Swan Lake, and a nightmarish rehearsal scene, where our heroine spectacularly wipes out of her fouetté turns while an impassive director intones, “Again. Again.” Yet Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) is not training to become a ballerina, but rather an assassin. She is learning the choreography of death.

I do not particularly like action movies. Nonetheless I went to Ballerina because Hollywood is reimagining the ballerina right now, and it interests me. In older movies such as The Red Shoes, Black Swan, and even lighter fare like Center Stage and Save the Last Dance, the ballerina’s power always curdles inward. In comedies, she uncurdles by embarking on some personal growth (which usually means learning to chill out). In tragedies, she kills herself. For seventy-five years or so, these were pretty much the two options for ballerinas in Hollywood.

But lately, ballet has become a weapon young women use, rather than a madness that uses them. In the school where Eve trains, for instance, the curriculum includes wrestling, target practice, navigating a room full of “killers” with rubber bullets—and mastering fouettés en pointe. Learning to kill and learning to spin in pink satin shoes are visually equated. As Eve turns and falls and turns and falls, the stage becomes spattered with blood. “Why do you push yourself so hard?” a fellow trainee asks Eve afterward, the camera lingering on Eve’s disfigured, blistered toes. The answer is obvious to anyone who has ever watched a ballet movie: because that’s what it takes. To be a dancer, like a killer, it helps to be a little crazy.

Though Eve’s unrelenting violence (Ballerina’s body count, I’d wager, is higher than its screenplay’s page count) may seem like a stark departure for the ballerina, the truth is that the desire for the blood of others has always lurked within the ballerina archetype. We can trace this demonic impulse all the way back to Giselle, the ur-Romantic ballet of dancing and madness.

The first act is devoted to betrayal: Giselle, a simple peasant with a weak heart, discovers that her fiancé is a disguised aristocrat, and, worse, betrothed to another. She staggers about the stage, half-mad. Reaching for her fiancé’s sword, she mimes stabbing herself, before abruptly falling to the ground, dead.

In other words, when Giselle is hurt, she hurts herself. This pattern created the prototype for the tortured ballerina in the cultural imagination: in The Red Shoes, Vicky Page throws herself off a balcony when her husband and ballet director force her into an impossible choice; in Black Swan, Nina Sayers stabs herself during a confused frenzy of madness brought on by her director’s mind games. Alchemizing anger into sadness and self-harm is not only for ballerinas, though. It is a time-honored tradition of the feminine, a way to neutralize aggression and give shape to anger without confronting anyone.

But in Giselle’s second act, we move from the sunny social world of the village to the liminal, eerie space of the cemetery, where we meet the vengeful Wilis. The ghosts of women who died before their wedding day, Wilis dance to death any man who wanders through the cemetery between dusk and dawn. They know how to get revenge. Predictably, the caddish fiancé shows up, and though the Wilis urge her to unleash a fatal dance, Giselle refuses. She protects him with the cross that marks her grave, dances sublimely with him, and forgives him.

Or does she? The Wilis trouble this story of Christian forgiveness. For aren’t they externalized embodiments of Giselle’s rage? She cannot turn the sword against Albrecht, so she conjures a ghostly sisterhood of vigilantes to take their revenge. They do what she cannot bring herself to do.

It is this split, this jagged crack, that recent movies like Ballerina mend, however clumsily. After witnessing her father’s murder in the opening minutes of Ballerina, Eve, like all these other women, is angry and traumatized. Lost in grief, she too is invited to join a troupe of angry Slavic spirits—Kikimora, rather than Wilis—but unlike Giselle, she accepts the offer wholeheartedly. The Kikimora, here, are trained assassins, and she uses the power acquired through her ballet and gun training to kill a lot of people, including—spoiler alert—the man responsible for her father’s death.

When she is hurt, she hurts back. In this respect, she is part of this new generation of Hollywood ballerinas. In Abigail, the 2024 horror-camp film, the titular heroine is a sweet little girl studying ballet, and a blood-thirsty vampire, a duality her would-be kidnappers discover too late. Much of the movie is spent relishing the visual irony of a blood-dappled ballerina terrorizing hardened criminals. In Étoile, the 2025 Amazon Prime TV series, Cheyenne is an international ballet star who inspires fear and grudging respect in the administrative apparatus around her: neither her director, nor her fellow dancers, nor even the war-criminal donor who funds her company, can stand up to her. Repeatedly, she makes unreasonable requests, and forces acquiescence with a French accent and defiant stare.

Of course, killing loads of people, or bullying others, shouldn’t be celebrated as a feminist triumph. But perhaps this is a necessary first step? Toward the end of Étoile’s first season, we see something even stranger than a ballerina hurting others. Cheyenne suffers a disappointment, and rather than harm herself, or unleash spectacular bloodshed, she indulges in some self-pity, and then sleeps with the wrong guy. Self-destructive? A bit. But relatable, too. Maybe the ballerina is finally becoming something more surprising than an assassin or a Slavic spirit: a human.