Over the Limit

The intense abuse captured in Marta Prus’s brilliant, diamond-hard documentary portrait of a Russian rhythmic gymnast’s punishing road to the 2016 Olympics is all too vividly real — just watching it induces veritable stomach cramps, though it’s impossible to turn away from the film’s whipcrack construction and expert manipulation of perspective.

Reports of excessively punitive training of female gymnasts surface with some regularity, so in that sense Over the Limit is not unexpected. But the Polish director Marta Prus, brilliantly constructing a very particular look at a sport in which the arch of an eyebrow is as important as that of a spine, remains coolly impassive.

The film is composed of minutely observed moments that Marta Prus has assembled into an affecting narrative.

Obtaining all-areas access to Olympic-competing Russian star athlete Margarita Mamun, Prus records in intense detail the verbal and physical pressures to which the young woman is subjected by her fiercely determined coaches.