The Novice Movie Review (2021)

A slow building sports movie that ultimately explodes, The Novice is an intense pressure cooker that only gets better the longer you watch. You’ve never seen a movie about rowing quite like this before.

There are some excellent sports films out there and some that are less than fantastic (I’m looking at you, Vision Quest). You get themes that run the gamut, including sportsmanship, team members feeling left out or less-than, and players that have to overcome obstacles – but this is different.

The Novice is about Alex Dall, an overachiever who has decided to join her college rowing team as a freshman. She is a physics major who excelled in high school and is now concerned about being a small fish in a big pond. Being a first-year, she and her fellow interested freshmen all join the rowing team as novices and get thrown into what it is to work for a spot in the boat.

This is a fascinating pressure cooker of a dark drama. Much like the old idea about boiling a frog, you begin the story with Alex and watch her go through a little dating, a little schooling, a little socializing, and a lot of drive. But ever so slowly, the intensity increases such that there is a point at which you aren’t sure how you didn’t see the water boiling around you.

Isabelle Fuhrman is phenomenal as Alex. She carries a quiet ferocity inside of her, pushing Alex to every extreme for success. She doesn’t do much speaking, which you don’t even realize until you start hearing her talk to her physics TA at length later in the movie. Which is odd because you feel like you know her well. You’ve been with her the whole time.

Alex is a woman who never quits. She counts the numbers, takes her physics tests 3 times (over and over) looking for mistakes during a single class, and is constantly writing down times to work towards in her rowing notebook. She is always in competition. Always. With everyone else and with herself.

One fascinating choice is that Alex hears the “caw” of a crow periodically. Is it there? Is it not? Crows in literature typically represent death or something bad happening, so what exactly does it mean here? Something to think about as you watch the film.

This is the kind of movie that starts off well and unpeels like an onion. In the midst of Alex’s life and rowing chaos, you don’t even see that it is happening until suddenly, it has been unpeeled. Things that were not clear before have suddenly bloomed into shape.

I didn’t think that I had an emotional connection to the movie, but I was wrong. I definitely did, I just didn’t realize it because the onion was peeling so slowly. And I highly encourage you to watch The Novice because it is very different. And that is how we get great art.

Runtime: 96 minutes

Motion Picture Rating: R

Languages Spoken In The Film: English

Should You Watch It? Yes

Did I Cry? Nope

My Rating: 3.75/5 Stars

Available: To rent on Prime Video or may be available for free on other streaming platforms