28/01/2025 - Timothée Catherine’s documentary brings us into the wild world of chessboxing, in which ranked chess player and amateur boxer Carl Strugnell competes with both brains and brawn

With his stout and boxy Mike Tyson-esque build – as he says himself in the film – one might falsely assume that Welshman Carl Strugnell is more of a fighter than a thinker, known as “Karl Ouch” in the ring. But the multilingual Strugnell – preferring to speak pitch-perfect French and also not at all struggling to speak Serbian either – is actually one of the UK’s best chess players and considers himself secondarily a boxer, with the two disciplines combined in Timothée Catherine's documentary about the fascinatingly niche sport of chessboxing. The Last KO traces Strugnell’s journey to defend his title as the World Chess Boxing Organisation (WCBO) Light Heavyweight World Chessboxing Champion, facing a considerably brawnier opponent against his more mentally driven strategy. The film began its run at FIPADOC and BelDocs, and most recently found a home in Kustendorf’s New Auteurs section, also owing in part to the subject’s connection to the region.

Catherine’s documentary begins with a montage sequence of black-and-white boxing images, the motion blur conveying an immense sense of movement. We then find Strugnell in Mokra Gora, Serbia, self-exiling in order to train, à la many legendary martial-arts masters of both fiction and reality. He has more concerns about being able to fend off stronger fighters, preferring to finish the chess game as fast as possible and force his opponent’s hand: namely, he doesn’t want to fight. The director tries to carve out the francophone Strugnell as almost a mythic figure: he’s been chessboxing for over ten years, bouncing between homelessness on Los Angeles’ Skid Row and living in Paris. However, the film might be better served by archival footage from those times instead of remaining solely in the present, where all we have to go off are verbal accounts that tell of, rather than show, Strugnell’s hill climb to success today. He is undoubtedly a fascinating character, but not providing the means for us to have a full grasp of his story makes The Last KO feel incomplete.

As the athlete-cum-intellectual jokes, chessboxing is a “fake sport” with little money involved; it’s primarily self-funded by players simultaneously in the best mental and physical shape of their lives. The sport is played in alternating rounds of timed chess and boxing, beginning with the former; the game ends when either opponent achieves a knockout (KO) in the ring or wins the chess game, either checkmate or due to an opponent running out of time. The chess portions are made into high-intensity, high-velocity sessions by rapid-fire commentary, just like any other sport.

The most difficult aspect is gripping the viewer early enough by the scope of the sport; Catherine never offers us a full picture of just how popular it is, the volume of spectators and so on, leaving out important context that would drive home the empathetic side of the movie. He fails to convey the stakes of the fight in the film’s 70-minute running time, instead diverting to tangents spent philosophising with friends and family.

Nonetheless, where Catherine does succeed is in the depiction of Strugnell’s long-awaited fight, which becomes breathtaking on screen in round after round of fast-moving camerawork by Mathieu Kauffmann, accompanied by the chants of the crowd. It gets hard to keep track of time speeding past thanks to how he captures the tension of the crowd and the stakes of this specific fight, from Strugnell’s perspective. The Last KO could very well be a short film centred around this matchup, as the rest of the feature fails to live up to the exhilaration of this sequence.

The Last KO is a French production by Tripode Productions, Incognita Films and Les Films de Catherine. Its world sales are up for grabs.