Blog Filmkritik Ballerina: Dance of Flames on the Ruska Roma Shadows

Author: Dr. Ismael Cortés

A flashback. It all began with the death of a dog—a final gift from a recently departed wife. That single act lit a fuse beneath the criminal underworld. When John Wick (dir. Chad Stahelski, USA) premiered in 2014, few predicted that a grieving assassin with impeccable aim would launch one of the most stylized action franchises of the decade.

Fast forward to 2025, and Ballerina (dir. Len Wiseman, USA)—arrives with a different kind of energy. A spin-off set between John Wick: Chapter 3 and Chapter 4—enters the scene with a very different pulse. Starring Ana de Armas as Eve Macarro, a young assassin trained by the obscure Ruska Roma, the film offers a new perspective within the Wick saga. The revenge plot remains intact: Eve is on a mission to avenge her father's murder. But where Wick sliced through grief with cold precision, Eve lingers in the aftermath. De Armas brings a raw emotional charge to the role, shifting the tone from operatic violence to something more intimate and tragic. Her presence unsettles the usual arc of righteous vengeance; rather than charging forward, she resists the idea that the cycle of violence is inevitable.

The film traces Eve’s transformation through fleeting, atmospheric glimpses: brief visual memories, wordless exchanges, and moments of weighted silence. Her Roma heritage, essential to her identity, is gestured at rather than explained, leaving viewers to piece together meaning from fragments. This stylistic choice opens the door to deeper questions about family loss, group loyalty, and human survival. Eve’s grief is intertwined with the rigorous discipline of her upbringing. Raised under the austere guidance of the Director (Anjelica Huston), leader of the Ruska Roma—a shadowy group of assassins introduced in earlier films—Eve is shaped by a world where elegance masks brutality. Told to “fight like a woman,” she’s taught to wield vulnerability as a weapon, trading brute force for instinct and psychological precision. The action sequences echo this training: balletic yet savage, interspersed with quiet introspection that grounds the violence in character rather than spectacle.

And yet, for all its layered ambition, the film stops short of fully exploring the cultural roots it draws from. The Ruska Roma serve primarily as a backdrop—a mysterious institution rather than a living community. Their representation is more symbolic than substantive, reducing them to a mythic order of assassins rather than engaging with the legacies of identity and heritage. This omission flattens Eve’s transformation, making her evolution feel disconnected from the very lineage the film claims to center.

While Ballerina succeeds in departing from the masculine archetype embodied by Wick, it stumbles in its portrayal of the culture it invokes. By using the Ruska Roma as an aesthetic motif without deeper engagement, the film echoes the same exoticized tropes that have long shadowed Romani communities in popular media falling in the trap of the Antigypsy Gaze. The narrative gestures at heritage but avoids exploring what that actually means.

More concerning is the revival of an old and troubling trope: the Roma as a secretive, shadowed culture—an invisible hand behind global networks of crime and power. This framing sustains a recurring fantasy: the enigmatic, transnational clan that moves silently across borders. Here, Roma identity is not depicted but abstracted, serving as a vessel for keeping an old myth alive.

Within a franchise obsessed with strict codes, esoteric rituals, and blood debts, that old myth becomes fashionable. The Ruska Roma operate as a cipher; a symbol of unseen power threaded through time and geography. They are never fully named, yet always present, a ghostly architecture of influence haunting the edges of every frame.

The grace of the assassin, the elegance of violence, the discipline of a ballet of bullets—all converge in a stylized vision that ultimately casts the Ruska Roma as a dark mirror—preserving a vision of the Roma identity as a myth. A force outside of law, shrouded in secrecy.