From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)

Ballerina takes the John Wick universe and does something unexpected with it—it slows down. Len Wiseman’s direction feels confident in ways that matter, steering this neo-noir action film away from the relentless momentum we’ve come to expect. Instead, we get Eve (Ana de Armas), an assassin trained by the Ruska Roma crime family, hunting down the people who killed her family. The world looks familiar, but the heartbeat is different.

Where John Wick’s violence flows from professional detachment, Eve’s comes from somewhere messier and more personal. She’s fighting with unhealed wounds, and that changes everything about how the film moves and breathes. The action still hits hard, but there’s grief underneath it that won’t let go.

Ana de Armas understands this character completely. Yes, she handles the fight choreography with conviction, but watch her in the spaces between the violence—that’s where she really shines. Her pain doesn’t announce itself with big emotional moments. It lives in how she holds her shoulders, in the way her eyes go distant for half a second before snapping back to focus. It’s the kind of performance that makes the film’s more stylised moments feel grounded in something real.

Keanu Reeves shows up as John Wick, but this isn’t his movie, and the film knows it. Eve’s journey stands on its own. Anjelica Huston returns as the Director, bringing that particular mix of elegance and menace she does so well. Her scenes bridge this story to the larger franchise while adding their own unsettling atmosphere.

The look of the film borrows from what came before—those clean, brutal fight sequences, the stark lighting, the careful choreography. But Wiseman adds something softer around the edges. There’s more smoke and shadow here, more dreamlike sequences that feel pulled from memory rather than happening in real time. The Eastern European influences in the production design give many locations an almost ceremonial weight, like we’re watching rituals in a forgotten religion rather than criminal business.

That abandoned theatre sequence everyone will talk about? It earns the attention. Eve fights under dying stage lights, and every movement suggests both dance training and lethal intent. It’s vicious and graceful at once—less about showing off than about expressing something that can’t be put into words.

The sound design deserves mention too. The synths and strings return from the earlier films, but the silences between them do just as much work. The dialogue stays minimal, sometimes almost too minimal, but the film trusts its actors and trusts us to follow along without everything being explained.

The pacing doesn’t always hold together. Some flashback sequences, rich as they are in detail, interrupt the forward momentum when you wish they wouldn’t. A few moments feel included because they serve the franchise rather than serving Eve’s specific story. But when the focus stays tight on her search, her memories, her particular kind of fighting, the rhythm finds itself again.

The symbolism runs throughout without becoming heavy-handed. A foot leaving bloody prints, mirrors breaking at crucial moments, a body that moves with dancer’s precision one second and killer’s efficiency the next—these images work because they don’t insist on themselves. They speak to what the film is really examining: how discipline can damage you, how violence becomes intimate, how beauty and pain get tangled together in ways that don’t easily separate.

Ballerina isn’t trying to be John Wick, and that’s its strength. It has more in common with Atomic Blonde or The Villainess—films that let emotion drive the action rather than the other way around. The smaller scale gives it room to dig deeper into who this person is and what she’s carrying.

Ballerina works because it offers something the franchise hasn’t given us before: someone whose violence comes from a place of genuine hurt rather than professional obligation. Eve isn’t building a legend or maintaining a reputation. She’s trying to put ghosts to rest in a world that doesn’t allow for proper mourning. The violence she brings feels necessary rather than celebrated, and the peace she’s looking for feels genuinely uncertain.

There’s something quietly devastating about how the film handles all of this. Every gunshot echoes with loss, and that resonance stays with you long after the screen goes dark.

If you’re drawn to action films that don’t forget to have a heart, if you can appreciate beauty that doesn’t shy away from its own sharp edges, this one will find you. It doesn’t demand your attention—it earns it.