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Kara Zor-El wants the universe to leave her alone, preferably on a planet where a red sun can make oblivion slightly easier. That is a funny premise for about three seconds, then Supergirl reveals the bruise under the joke: Milly Alcock’s Kara has not become a messy party girl because the film thinks rebellion equals personality. She drinks because she can remember the end of her world.
Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl sends Kara far from Metropolis, far from Kal-El’s heroic clarity, and far from any version of herself that might be easy to market on a lunchbox. She is living out of a spaceship RV with Krypto, ignoring Superman’s messages, and marking her 23rd birthday by getting properly hammered somewhere her Kryptonian biology cannot protect her from her own choices. This is the film’s strongest early idea. Power, here, is not liberation. It is a barrier between Kara and the human-scale collapse she keeps chasing through alcohol, sarcasm, and badly timed violence.
Then Ruthye Marye Knoll arrives with a sword and a revenge fantasy. Eve Ridley plays her as a child trying to sound like a myth because ordinary grief would be too small for what has happened to her. Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, has murdered her family, and Ruthye walks into a room full of cosmic lowlifes asking someone to help her kill him. Kara notices because Kara cannot quite stop noticing suffering. This is her tragic flaw, if decency can be called a flaw (which, in current superhero economics, it sometimes can).
The Girl Who Refuses the Statue
The film is at its best when it treats Kara’s heroism as behavior rather than branding. She does not announce a moral code. She intervenes, regrets being involved, then intervenes again. In the bar, she wants distance from Ruthye’s problem, but the sight of a child being swallowed by a room of predators cuts through the haze. Later, after Krem poisons Krypto and steals Kara’s ship, the mission gains a clean external shape: recover the antidote before the dog dies. The emotional shape is dirtier. Kara is chasing the man who hurt the last living creature that lets her feel like home still exists.
Krypto could have been intolerable. The film flirts with that danger early, especially when his CGI mischief leans into comic chaos. Still, the dog becomes a sharper device once he is wounded. His poisoning gives the film a ticking clock, but it also exposes Kara’s dependency on a creature who asks nothing from her except presence. Superman has Earth, parents, a newspaper, a costume that looks like civic architecture. Kara has a dog and a vehicle that looks one bad landing away from becoming scrap. The imbalance matters.
Alcock understands that imbalance. Her performance keeps rejecting the clean lines of superhero emergence. Watch the shift between her drunken body language in the red-sun bar and her guarded stillness when Ruthye’s pain starts to resemble her own. The jokes come out like small acts of self-defense. The punches feel less like choreography than irritation given flight. In the flashbacks to Argo City and her parents, Alcock gives Kara a child’s memory inside an adult’s anger. The film says she survived Krypton. Her face keeps adding, yes, and that was the problem.
Ruthye and the Mathematics of Revenge
Call it vengeance arithmetic: Ruthye believes one dead Krem can balance one murdered family. Kara knows the equation is false because she has been living inside its remainder. This is where Supergirl finds its most interesting moral argument. The film is not asking whether Krem deserves punishment. He clearly does. He murders innocents, poisons Krypto, runs with the Brigands, and operates within a system of abduction that turns girls into property. The question is what killing him will do to Ruthye after the blade comes down.
Kara’s refusal to let Ruthye become a murderer gives the movie a spine that its larger franchise obligations occasionally try to bend out of shape. She equips the child, drags her across hostile planets, and keeps her alive without pretending that protection is gentle work. Their bond is not syrupy. It is built from blunt correction, mutual exhaustion, and the strange intimacy of shared damage.
Ridley’s performance matters here because Ruthye cannot be reduced to a symbol of innocence. She has seen too much for that. Her revenge speech in the bar has a rehearsed quality, as if repetition has become the only way she can keep standing. Later, when she watches Kara unleash herself against the Brigands, the film gives her a dangerous education in power. A child who has lost everything is being shown that violence can work. Kara’s task is to prove that it cannot cure.
There is a version of this story that turns Kara into a polished mentor. Thank God this film is too grubby for that. Kara does not know how to heal Ruthye. She can barely keep herself functional. What she can do is stand between Ruthye and the fantasy that one righteous murder will close the wound.
Cosmic Grime, Familiar Maps
Gillespie builds a universe that looks sticky, scarred, and frequently in need of ventilation. The red-sun bar, the dying city, the barren wastelands, the Brigands’ vehicles, and the stolen-girl compound all push the film toward a space western with post-apocalyptic bad breath. This is not the clean wonder of Superman’s world. It is a cosmos of bad wiring, rotten teeth, and men who mistake domination for destiny. Subtle? No. Effective? Often.
The visual language borrows openly. Kara’s coat and headphones carry traces of Guardians of the Galaxy. The wasteland gangs and abducted captives point toward Mad Max. The alien bars and creature work carry the old cantina impulse, that pleasure of looking into a corner and wondering which latex nightmare has a mortgage. Some of this familiarity dulls the film’s edge. Some of it gives the movie a useful shorthand. The problem is not that Supergirl has influences. The problem is that the film sometimes wears them like borrowed armor.
Krem is the best example. Schoenaerts looks fantastic in the role: beads in his face, machinery worked into his body, a voice mechanism that makes speech feel like a contaminated process. He eats, snarls, collects, and brutalizes with a grotesque casualness. The performance has texture. The writing gives him less interiority than his design promises. He is vile, which the film establishes through murder, trafficking, and cruelty. He is also oddly static. A monster with a great silhouette is still a monster waiting for a second dimension.
The action has a similar split. Kara tumbling through space gives the film one of its few sequences where invulnerability feels uncertain. Her fights against the Brigands carry force because Alcock sells anger as momentum. Yet too many brawls lean on the familiar superhero grammar of fast hero, slow enemies, bodies flying into metal. The impact arrives less through invention than through context. Kara is not punching villains because the genre demands a mid-act burst of movement. She is punching the architecture of harm. That sounds grander than some of the staging deserves, but the idea is there.
Lobo and the Franchise Gravity Problem
Jason Momoa’s Lobo enters like a studio note that grew teeth. He looks right, moves right, chomps and growls with the confidence of a man who knows the toy design has already been approved. He is fun, in the bluntest possible sense. The issue is that fun and function keep arguing inside the role.
Lobo works as a devil figure near Ruthye, a walking permission slip for violent revenge. He can say the thing Kara refuses to say and make vengeance sound entertaining. That is useful. Then he vanishes for long stretches, returns when the machinery needs him, and leaves the impression of a character smuggled in from a louder movie. This is franchise gravity: the force that pulls a personal story toward whatever the next corporate constellation requires. Sometimes it gives the frame scale. Sometimes it drops a motorcycle into a grief fable and asks us to clap.
David Corenswet’s Superman is better handled because his presence sharpens Kara by contrast. Kal-El is not there to rescue the film or Kara. He is the ethical cousin she cannot imitate. His messages, his steadiness, and his connection to Earth make Kara’s exile feel chosen and involuntary at once. He became a symbol because Earth gave him the conditions for belief. Kara remembers the catastrophe too clearly to become that kind of symbol. She is heroic, yes, but she is also rude, avoidant, angry, and allergic to the ceremonial posture of goodness. In other words, she is alive.
The film’s feminist gestures are strongest when they stay embodied. Kara refusing to smile for comfort. Kara protecting abducted girls from the Brigands. Kara telling Ruthye, through action rather than speech, that kindness may require brutality without becoming bloodlust. The weaker gestures arrive through surface coding: the Blondie shirt, the playlist cues, the slowed-down song choices that occasionally feel like someone trying to manufacture girlhood from a streaming algorithm. A film this angry does not need so much cosmetic rebellion. It already has Kara’s face.
Supergirl remains uneven because its best instincts are intimate and its loudest instincts are industrial. It wants to sit with Kara’s grief, Ruthye’s rage, and Krypto’s poisoned body. It also wants to service a growing DCU, introduce Lobo, stage familiar cosmic mayhem, and prove that the franchise can be weird without frightening the shareholders. That tension does not destroy the film. It gives it a limp.
Still, Alcock keeps pulling it back toward the wound. Her Kara does not become good because she is inspired by a speech, a cape, or a legacy. She becomes good in the least romantic way possible: by repeatedly failing to abandon people she could have ignored. That may be the film’s most honest thought. Heroism is not always a calling. Sometimes it is the terrible inconvenience of still having a conscience.
Supergirl is distributed theatrically worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, releasing globally this week. The story follows Kara Zor-El, a young woman raised on an aggressive, fragmented remnant of Krypton, as she embarks on an epic interstellar journey alongside an alien girl seeking cosmic vengeance.
Where to Watch Supergirl (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Supergirl
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date: June 26, 2026
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 107 minutes
Director: Craig Gillespie
Writers: Ana Nogueira
Producers and Executive Producers: James Gunn, Peter Safran
Cast: Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, Jason Momoa, Ferdinand Kingsley, Diarmaid Murtagh, David Corenswet
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Rob Hardy
Editors: Tatiana S. Riegel
Composer: Claudia Sarne
The Review
Supergirl
Supergirl works best when Kara’s grief is allowed to stay ugly: the red-sun drinking, the refusal to answer Kal-El, the feral charge toward anyone who hurts Krypto. The film stumbles when the DC machine starts waving from the corner, especially with Lobo, who arrives like a franchise coupon with face paint. Alcock gives the movie its moral weather, turning kindness into something bruised rather than polite. Gillespie’s cosmic grime has texture, even when the plot borrows too many maps.
PROS
- Milly Alcock’s wounded force
- Strong Kara and Ruthye dynamic
- Krypto gives grief a pulse
- Grimy cosmic settings
- Krem’s vicious physical presence
CONS
- Lobo feels underused
- Action lacks fresh shape
- Music cues can feel cosmetic
- DCU setup distracts
- Krem needs sharper psychology
