Marty Supreme (2025)
Written by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie
Directed by Josh Safdie
2025 was the year we saw the results of the great Safdie Brothers split. Benny gave us The Smashing Machine, which also served as an opportunity for Dwayne Johnson’s reinvention as a serious, Oscar-worthy actor. It wasn’t a terrible film, but it didn’t evoke the same emotions in me as the films on my favorites list this year. I’m not writing Benny off; his performance and involvement in the television series The Curse was phenomenal. When it came to directing feature films in 2025, it was Josh’s time to shine. Marty Supreme was hyped to an extreme degree, which is always risky, but it ultimately lived up to that hype, emerging as one of the best pictures of the year while building on the themes the Safdies established as a duo.
Marty Supreme follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a gifted but volatile table tennis player from New York whose ambition is matched only by his self-destructive streak. After burning bridges on the American circuit, Marty is pushed onto the international stage, where he clashes with a coterie of criminals, corrupt officials, and his own spiraling ego while chasing legitimacy in a sport that treats him as both spectacle and threat. As his personal life fractures through romantic entanglements, exploitative mentors, and the pressure of being marketed as a symbol rather than a person, Marty is ultimately forced to reckon with what success actually costs; whether it’s the blunt pleasure of domination or the quieter discipline of survival.
Chalamet builds Marty almost entirely through kinetic intensity, turning the film into a study of nervous motion. His performance is all sharp angles and twitchy momentum: the way he stalks the table before a match, shoulders hunched and jaw tight, bleeds into his interactions outside of table tennis. During the brutal international final, shot in extended takes, his footwork becomes frantic and reckless; sweat, breath, and exhaustion made visible. Even off the table, Chalamet keeps the energy simmering. He engages in a constant stream of attempts to convince friends and family to give him just one more chance; he fidgets, crowds the frame, can’t stop running his mouth or hyping himself up. Marty’s body is always moving, always striking, because stopping would mean confronting the emptiness he’s been swatting away. He has to build his myth, and that requires ceaseless motion.
The women in Marty’s life are all complex in ways the audience may initially miss. Rachel (Odessa A’zion) appears at first to be a fragile young woman. Her husband seems like an ignorant brute; until we see the true scope of his abuse, which manifests less as overt violence and more as infantile tantrums and destruction. Rachel serves as a perfect foil to Marty: another survivor scraping along the bottom rungs of society, lying because that is the only way to endure. She sells herself differently than Marty, shaped by the social expectations and constraints placed on her as a woman, but she possesses an edge just as sharp as his.
Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), the older, famous actress with whom Marty begins an affair, presents herself as a refined grand dame of the stage. Meanwhile, she’s having sex with Marty in Central Park in the middle of the night while a party rages in her Manhattan apartment to celebrate the opening of her play. She lies to her husband and those around her to sustain a dalliance with a young man she barely knows. There’s a moment when she learns Marty tried to pawn a necklace he stole from her, only to discover it was costume jewelry, and Kay remarks that if she were Marty, she would have stolen it too. Kay may be at the top, but the film allows us to infer that she engaged in similar bombast and deceit to get there.
Marty’s mother (Fran Drescher) is also a liar. We are introduced to her through a phone call Marty receives at work from his aunt, claiming that his mother is so ill she needs to be hospitalized. When Marty arrives later, she appears perfectly fine, which he immediately remarks on. None of this deception or manipulation is judged by the film. Instead, Safdie explores how the United States functions as a culture where such behavior is made mandatory by a predatory economic system. The greater the desperation, the more likely people are to turn on those they love in order to survive. In Marty’s case, survival has become synonymous with mythmaking. You make yourself immortal this way.
Across the films of the Safdie Brothers, desperation is not a dramatic spike but a constant atmospheric pressure; an ambient condition of modern life that forces survival into a series of reckless, short-term calculations. In Daddy Longlegs, survival is refracted through irresponsibility and arrested adulthood: the father’s love for his children is genuine, even tender, but inseparable from his inability to provide stability. Heaven Knows What strips away even that fragile cushioning, presenting desperation as bodily and psychic dependency—on drugs, on lovers, on the fragile mythology of romantic suffering. By the time we reach Good Time, desperation has metastasized into propulsion. Connie’s manic momentum turns survival into violent forward motion, a refusal to stop because stopping would mean reckoning with guilt and moral responsibility. Across these films, the Safdies portray survival not as triumph but as damage control—an exhausting, often self-destructive improvisation within systems designed to grind people down, trapping their characters in loops they mistake for escape routes.
Marty’s ending feels markedly different from the conclusions of these other films. There is a sense of possible triumph, but on closer inspection, Marty is just as much a loser as the rest of these characters. He has lost any chance of continuing as an international table tennis player; he allowed himself to be publicly humiliated for little more than illusion; the mother of his child was shot as a result of his actions; and he is no richer than he was at the beginning of the film. The only difference now is that there is another human life in the picture.
Josh Safdie has said that a lot of the film came out of his experience in becoming a parent and thinking about what your parents were like before they were born.
In an interview with The Ringer he stated, “I believe the movie is a little bit about seeing your parents before you were born. Like seeing pictures of them, and thinking, ‘Huh, what was going on there?’ What was their purpose? Well … I was their purpose. There’s a lot of mystery in those photographs. You’re very sculptable in youth. And when you have a child, I think a part of you hardens. It just does. There’s now one person, who for the rest of their life, will have a strict point of view on you. That’s the new dream. The beauty of people who manage to remain forever young is that they can stay sculptable in the context of parenthood and not compromise.”
There’s also a metatextual element of being an actor, refusing to believe in a future with failure. Marty introduces himself to Kay by comparing what he does to her profession, delusion is the engine that drives success in America. For Marty, hustling is life, the birth of children presents another reason to hustle, to feed the myth he is making of himself to a blank slate.
Safdie has said that Marty represents the ambition of postwar America. The inclusion of 1980s songs and an electronic soundtrack seem out of place initially, but serve a thematic purpose. He expanded on this in an interview with The Guardian, “And then, in the 1980s, America was coming out of the defeat in Vietnam and the cultural and economic depression. So Reagan tried to resurrect the American dream. But this time, it was in quote marks. The 80s were the first postmodern era – and are really the most lasting era. You walk around and hear 80s music all the time. It was the last truly modern movement. It was then that capitalism won, the past began to haunt the future and the future was just revisiting the past.”
Marty Supreme is a film made with intense passion by everyone involved. This wasn’t a studio-hacked production; it was clearly a passion project. I always look forward to what the Safdies do next, and I’m curious to see how they evolve as filmmakers now that they are working apart. I see Josh moving in a slightly new direction while still holding true to the kinds of protagonists the Safdies are known for. I also find Chalamet to be a bolt of energy, and his ambition makes me eager to see what he does next.
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