‘The Queen of Villains’ Is Bloody Beautiful

Netflix’s The Queen of Villains taps the mesmerizing actor Yuriyan Retriever to tell Japanese wrestling sensation’s Kaoru “Dump” Matsumoto bloody origin story in a fast-breaking five-round combat drama that leaves it all on the mat. Boos and curses rain down on a hazy wrestling ring as Matsumoto’s gruesomely painted face contorts, stabbing her opponent in the head with a fork and laughing sadistically. It’s the mid-1980s and the Japanese pro wrestling heel is at the top of her game and lapping up the hate: she’s a punk boogeyman terrorizing Japan’s most beloved fighters, spectacularly trolling national anxieties about westernization, spurring one of the most legendary rivalries in wrestling history, and raking in serious cash–all while dodging stalkers, stabbers and swarms of vengeful fans as the country’s most hated antihero.

With her dysfunctional family, bleached blonde hair and biker jacket, KISS-influenced makeup, and the leering aggression of a girl-gang sukeban, Dump was the antithesis of Japanese cultural ideals. Bullied by peers and professionally overlooked, she mastered crowd psychology to develop an all-out chaotic fighting style with brutal, spontaneous action that twanged fans’ amygdala like a spring. She transformed herself into the emotional ringmaster of a bloody circus that built a wrestling empire by rage-baiting an entire country under the collective tension of shifting norms.

Dump started her career as Japan was opening to western influence in the early 80s, successfully importing and hybridizing foreign combat styles in shoot wrestling, pancrase, mixed martial arts, and puroresu, a portmanteau of the Japanese pronunciation of “pro wrestle.” The series also focuses on the growing influence of lucharesu, which marries Lucha Libre’s masks and acrobatics with puroresu’s storytelling drama, unscripted grappling and technical focus. Japan had adapted puroresu as a serious sport between dedicated athletes, but Dump leaned into a new western school of theatrical gore, outrageous props and costumes, and over-the-top antics to weaponize the crowd’s energy instead. The Queen of Villains pits the polar opposite styles against each other through escalating conflicts among the wrestlers and management over which philosophy would dominate the industry.

As the leader of the Atrocious Alliance villain stable, Dump pursued a fierce rivalry with pop-princess tag team the Crush Gals, stirring a frenzy that sold out arenas and spiked television ratings during the 1980s. “Dump Matsumoto isn’t another wrestling heel and she’s not a TV show character either,” says a fan. “She’s more something out of folklore, a mythological monster.”

“To me Dump belongs in the category with Michael Myers from Halloween, Jason from Friday the 13^th,” agrees another admirer. “She’s one of the great horror characters in film & television history.” As her villainy drew outrage along with hundreds of millions of yen, the fight choreography got more extreme and her evil persona became so convincing that Crush fans regularly harassed and attacked her.

Along with Dump’s personal journey from rags to ring general, the show unveils the workings behind Japan’s longstanding wrestlemania that weaves the country’s rich fighting arts traditions with its appetite for – and apprehension of – postwar globalization. The show plays out this value tension well: a roomful of chain-smoking businessmen puppeteer the futures of young joshi hopefuls as screaming teen devotees of the latest baby-faced heroine buy fan gear and chant alongside middle-aged gamblers and World War II vets in packed arenas like a Taylor Swift concert.

The Queen of Villains also employs space to stretch Kaoru between her abusive, stagnant past and elusive future stardom until she snaps and becomes Dump. The wrestling gym with its lucha posters, Western office furniture, Playboy magazines and Coca-Cola products is a shining world away from her mother’s cramped one-room apartment at whose traditional table fish is a luxury meal.

The series itself plays out like an underdog fight: a foreign-language show about a sports phenomenon Americans outside Walmart country don’t appreciate, in a creative project that evokes hardly a mutter outside pro wrestling forums. Like Dump herself, series star Yuriyan Retriever is a dark horse who expanded her performative boundaries to dominate the role: known primarily as a comedian, Retriever trained for two years and gained almost 90 pounds to achieve a wrestler’s physique and also sang the intro song for the series, a remake of a punk number Dump originally recorded in 1986 called “Dump the Heel.”

“In playing Dump, it was important to let out all the emotions that spring up from inside me, including the frustration of being unable to do well despite trying hard, and the isolation of being left behind,” Yuriyan says. “Dump was criticized and hated by everyone in Japan, but she accepted it and used it as a weapon. I think that’s similar to comedy. I was able to deconstruct everything that I’ve done as a comedian and everything I have been unable to do until now.”

The show’s ambiguous approach to violence creates a weird math that plays a fictional portrayal of a theatrical event completely straight, with airball kicks and limp slo-mo slaps diluting wig-splitting, gore-gushing brawls, referees keeling over from real blows. Some fights are predetermined while others are unscripted, but the show treats every match as a deadly serious plot point: every grudge is genuine and every battle injury is real. As anemic as the action might look at times, the actors themselves bear the bruises from training with the real-life Matsumoto and Chigusa Nagayo. who served as fight supervisors and advisers to film an astonishing ninety-three minutes of onscreen brawling across five episodes. The Queen of Villains preserves the sport’s discipline and showmanship while interrogating and reclaiming its more exploitative features with an earnestness that borders on magical realism.

Like the center-ring drama it portrays, The Queen of Villains is a smartly-curated phenomenon that brings audacious visuals, ambitious scale, and broad social themes buried in raw talent-driven storytelling to enliven and expand Dump’s saga until it reaches its ultimate spectacle at the final bell.