Julie Keeps Quiet: smart tennis drama finds suspense in what is left unsaid

Leonardo Van Dijl’s debut feature begins where Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) left off: on a tennis court, where a player mimes shots with an imaginary ball. This young woman is Julie, a rising star on the Belgian tennis circuit. Moments after we meet her, she’ll learn that her coach, Jeremy, has been suspended. The reasons for the suspension are opaque but, given that he’s been implicated in the suicide of his previous protégée, it’s natural that the club wants to speak to all its students. Whatever Julie knows, though, she’s not telling.

Van Dijl likewise gives little away. Aesthetically, Julie Keeps Quiet is the anti-Challengers (2024), fully embedded in the tedium and repetition involved in elite sport (the film’s exec producers include Florian Zeller, the Dardennes and Naomi Osaka). This is a film of blank spaces and faces: the anonymous any-space whatevers of schools and medical centres, the sports halls and gyms. Sporting baggy shorts and T-shirts, hair scrunchied into an efficient ponytail, Julie moves through this world with joyless determination in a manner that calls to mind Jeanne Dielman. For the most part, cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis keeps the camera low to the ground or trained on newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck’s impassive face, visually echoing her hyperfocus.

It’s only as Julie begins to reformulate her relationships in the wake of her coach’s suspension that the world begins to open, and establishing shots appear that place Julie alongside her supportive peers. It seems a given that Julie has been abused. She is isolated and secretive, skittish around the numerous adult men she is left alone with and whose job it is to pay close attention to her body (a replacement trainer, a physio). We see her talking – or rather listening – to her suspended coach in bed, phone resting on her chest like a lover’s head, and covertly texting him while her father obliviously prattles away. At one point there is a clandestine meeting, during which Julie appears disoriented and pulls away. The other adults in Julie’s life make half-hearted attempts to coax her to talk. But they don’t really want to know what transpired, perhaps for fear of exposing their own complicity, the unacknowledged suspicions that may have long predated the current investigation.

As in Blow-Up, the film’s quiet suspense is driven not by what happened, but by the instability of the protagonist and her relationship to her own reality. We are left wondering how Julie sees, or makes sense of, her abuse, what she will tell herself in order to survive it. Ultimately, the answer to that mystery is hers alone to hold.

► Julie Keeps Quiet is in UK cinemas now.