Dump Matsumoto was a reviled — and thus beloved — heel within the All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling league within the Nineteen Eighties. “The Queen of the Villains” (on Netflix, in Japanese with subtitles, or dubbed) is a colourful five-part scripted drama based mostly loosely on her younger life and early profession, and it traces each her rise and the rising reputation of ladies’s professional wrestling in Japan on the time.
The present lands extra as a boppy superhero origin story than as an earnest biopic: It is at instances shiny and exaggerated, a tidy story about messy folks and an absolute bonanza of retro tracksuits. Yuriyan Retriever stars as Dump, although for a lot of the present she is just Kaoru, a younger lady with nowhere to place all her anger and ambition. Her father is an abusive drunk who drifts out and in of her life, stealing from her mom and belittling her and her youthful sister. As a tween, she learns that her father has a secret different household — together with one other daughter additionally named Kaoru. It’s sufficient to make a very good woman go dangerous.
Our Kaoru falls in love with wrestling, with being inspired to be robust, robust and violent. A grim dedication to easily maintain going is as highly effective as any suplex, and the ring is considered one of few locations the place being a bigger lady is an asset.
But it isn’t all the time simple for Kaoru to maintain monitor of what’s actual and what’s only for present, and as she dissolves into her Dump persona, another wrestlers recoil. It’s all a enjoyable sisterhood till Dump brings a sequence into the ring and begins choking folks. And few friendships survive repeated stabbings within the scalp with a fork.
“Queen” itself displays Dump’s ambiguous realities. We’re by no means positive how cranked up the artifice of all of it is, how a lot of a match is choreographed, the diploma to which the wrestlers agree on what’s faux. Dump wrestles in a couple of “hair matches,” through which the winner cuts the loser’s hair, however she additionally holds a colleague down and shaves her hair outdoors the ring, at their dorm. Inept, detached administration leaves the wrestlers to determine requirements on their very own. But they don’t all the time agree on what’s secure and acceptable, or on whose star-making strikes ought to get precedence.
Appropriately for a present about professional wrestling, “Queen” feels each illicit and healthful. Retriever’s efficiency captures Kaoru’s innocence and ferocity — the turmoil of being happy with and afraid of what’s inside you.