A 12-year-old mixed martial artist grapples with her suffocating new sports bra and her domineering dad, pushing her changing body to surreal limits during her toughest match yet.

CUB, directed by Sofia Rubin, is a visceral and surreal coming-of-age horror that transforms puberty into something raw, physical, and unnervingly cinematic. The film follows a 12-year-old mixed martial artist preparing for what should be just another fight — but as her body begins to change and the pressure from her domineering father intensifies, the boundaries between sport, identity, and transformation begin to fracture. What starts as a story about discipline and competition slowly morphs into something far more unsettling.

Blending body horror with intimate psychological tension, CUB explores the suffocating expectations placed on young girls — especially within hyper-masculine spaces — and the confusion that arises when control slips away. Rubin crafts a world where physical growth becomes monstrous and empowerment feels dangerously close to self-destruction. Equal parts creature feature and emotional reckoning, CUB punches far beyond its runtime, leaving a lingering bruise long after the final round.

CUB is rooted in your own childhood experiences in martial arts. What made you want to revisit those memories through film, and why did horror feel like the right language to tell this story?

I was a martial artist from ages 3-14. I got my black belt six days after my 9th birthday. Up to that point, I had spent countless hours on the mat, giving up so many other aspects of my childhood to put fighting at the forefront. The kicker was that I hated it. Sometimes I hated it so much I would burst into tears before class, pleading not to go. Over a decade of my young life was categorized by this violence, not only in the physical domination of other children but also in the constant battle with my obsessive martial artist father, at whose whim I was forced to train. Then, to add insult to many injuries, I went through puberty. There was no space for me to be uncomfortable in my body alone — I also had to wear skin-tight jiu jitsu shirts, experience the trauma of a first sports bra, and have sweaty teenage boys on top of me every week, all under the hawklike judgement of my dad. If that isn’t a recipe for some unique horror, I don’t know what is. The memories and fears of that period are seared into my brain, as well as the anger, the fierce and rebellious drive to take control of my own life and say, No more. I felt I had to make a film about it. Film is my language.

The film captures the tension between discipline and autonomy. How did you want to explore the idea that something meant to build strength can also feel suffocating when choice is removed?

Truly anything can become suffocating once choice is removed. This is particularly the case during puberty, when the blinders of childhood obedience begin to fall away. Hell hath no fury like a tween girl scorned. Something significant to my own experience was watching other young girls who really did find strength and autonomy in fighting, the girls whose mouthguards matched their gloves, whose braids were perfect even after rolling on the mat. Those girls could stop fighting if they wanted to, and it was their choice to fight that drove them. I wanted to capture that in Shayna, the opponent in CUB. She’s driven, she wants it, her mom comforts her and fixes her hair after the matches instead of running her through drills. Kim, my protagonist, watches these exchanges and ultimately finds her own strength to speak up against the way she’s treated.

Puberty and physical change become almost monstrous in the film. How did you approach using body horror to express emotions that are difficult to articulate, especially at such a young age?

Anyone who’s been through puberty knows that’s how it feels! It’s horrifying finding hair in places you’d never seen before. As a kid, you really don’t have the language to articulate what’s happening, you just know that you’re changing. For me, puberty was an angry time. I wanted to hide in a dark cave and never come out, but I also wanted to scream and rip all my clothes and thrash around and have an attitude. Why is this happening to me? Why am I suddenly ugly? Why is everyone so concerned with my goddamn chest? Body horror was the perfect way to express these feelings through hyperbole. Take the shock of finding new hair on your body, but make it tenfold as it covers your arm in a blanket of striped fur, etc. I had a lot of fun coming up with these things, and all the tween girls who have seen the film so far have really resonated with them.

The relationship between the young fighter and her father is central to the film’s unease. How did you work to portray that dynamic with complexity rather than clear heroes or villains?

I actually fixated very hard on this. I specifically didn’t want the dad to be a villain because that’s simply not true to life. There are no villains, only individuals with their own motivations. While he could be a real hardass, my dad loved me unconditionally, and ultimately what he wanted was for his daughter to be able to defend herself. Though I would rather have died than admit it at the time, I’m eternally grateful for my training. In my adulthood, I’m still disciplined, athletic, confident, mentally and physically strong. I walk with my shoulders back because I know I can always take care of myself. Plus, how many other girls can say they got their black belt at 9? How many other girls can say they won a katana in a grappling championship at 10? Thanks to my dad, I’m a righteous badass. I wanted to portray their love for each other in the film because that’s how it was in real life.

The sports bra becomes a powerful symbol of confinement. How did sound design, breath, and physical sensation help build the film’s sense of claustrophobia?

My sound designer is one of my closest friends from college — shout out to Maya. She’s gotten so many compliments on the design because it brings the whole film to life. Most of the breathing sounds are actually Maya panting into a mic under the sheets in her bedroom, haha. We went into the film knowing we wanted it to be claustrophobic because that’s how the experience felt. There’s suffocation from all corners — the sports bra, the dad’s emotional pressure, the physical pressure of another body on top of your own. When I sat down with my amazing DP James Kolsby and my fierce co-writer / producer / now-boyfriend Myles Brewer to create the cinematic language, we were inspired by the likes of Black Swan and American Honey, whose cameras almost never leave the protagonist. Every shot either looks at her or reflects her point of view, to the point where it becomes suffocating. We also threw in some Uncut Gems-style chaos, with whip pans, quick cuts, and constantly overlapping lines of dialogue to further crowd the space of the film.

During the match, the film slips into surreal territory. How did you decide when to push reality into exaggeration, and what emotional truth were you most focused on preserving in those moments?

I’ve seen a lot of films about tween girls going through puberty, where someone gets her period at a gymnastics meet, or someone gets her period at a sleepover, and there’s some big embarrassing scandal. While those movies are great, I wanted to stray away from that formula and exchange embarrassment for something more potent like wrath. It’s been an enlightening experience growing up as a woman and learning how to be angry. Becoming a woman, becoming a tiger — why should they be different? It also happened to be the case that the mascot for my MMA school was a tiger, and the little kids’ class (the class I started in) was called Cubs. The metaphor made perfect sense, given the additional implication of the tiger cub’s relation to the tiger parent. When I initially approached Myles about the idea, he was a huge fan of the metaphor, and pushed me to develop the short because of how cinematic and symbolic he found it. He was also a guiding light in terms of where we wanted to lean into genre elements and where we wanted to pull back: it was important to us to maintain a dramatically-driven plot structure and to tell the story effectively and engagingly, while still having a little movie magic SFX fun. (Additional shout out to our incredible SFX artist Era!)

CUB speaks to the experience of being watched, evaluated, and pushed before having a fully formed sense of self. How important was it for you to center the idea of agency in the story?

Paramount. In the writing process Myles and I would often ask ourselves, What does this character want? What’s her objective? It felt like she was being thrown passively into her circumstances as a result of not having a choice in the matter, which was true to life but not quite goal-oriented enough to drive a short film. The conclusion we came to was that the one thing she wants most of all — and that I ultimately wanted most of all as a kid going through this — was agency. She wants the right to choose. So when her dad tries to clean her face in the end, she bites his fingers off, because she has found the power to choose to be dirty.

You’ve said you hope the film reaches parents who push their children too far. What conversations do you hope CUB sparks between parents and children?

I hope there’s at least one parent who can look at their child and ask, Do I make you feel like this? It’s what I wish my dad did. He still hasn’t seen the film because he thinks it portrays him poorly. But that’s sort of the point, to reflect on someone else’s experience of you in pursuit of being the best you can be. While I don’t have kids yet, I often feel that parenting should be a collaboration between an adult and a child instead of a dictatorship. I hope there’s a little girl who watches this movie and finds the strength to stand up for herself.

Looking back now, what did making CUB give you that you didn’t have as a child—and how has it shaped the stories you want to tell next?

Making CUB gave me the ending to my story that I didn’t get to have. I obviously didn’t ever bite my dad’s fingers off, but Kim gets to have a sort of “show him who’s boss” moment that I still haven’t had to this day. So it was cathartic in that way. Though I’ve been making films since I was around 11, CUB was my first professional short outside of the safety net of film school, and making it was an excellent exercise. Not only did it give me more courage and confidence in my own abilities as a director, it also really illuminated the power of the community with which I surround myself, filmmakers and non-filmmakers alike. The outpouring of support for this film made me excited at the scope of my own potential. I also felt like I got that part of my life out onto the screen, and now I can move on from it into weirder, grosser things. Body horror is definitely a genre I want to pursue. I love exploring human anxieties, especially of the physical kind, and CUB’s puberty commentary was a foray into some more nuanced body-related work I have pinned on the development cork board. 😉

What are the books, podcasts or even YouTube Channel that you recommend young filmmakers get their hands on?

This is a great question! I recently read Quentin Tarantino’s book Cinema Speculation in which he basically details a catalogue of films he loves and what exactly makes them great. I think about his commentary all the time now when I’m developing ideas. He has a great handle on what gets an audience excited, which to me is the ultimate goal of making movies. I also love watching the Director Roundtable that the Hollywood Reporter releases every year before the Oscars. It’s so helpful to listen to other directors talk about directing, especially with each other, since their language is shared.

Can you share with us some of your favorite short films you’ve seen lately?

CUB was fortunate enough to premiere at the 2025 Palm Springs International ShortFest,
so we saw a ton of incredible shorts there. One that I loved was in the same block as CUB — we opened the block, and this film closed it. It’s called Kuchar, the Itch, and it’s a funny and heartwarming short about a young Indian girl who discovers the *pleasures* of sitting on her washing machine. Vaidaangi Sharma, the filmmaker, is also a delightful person. Another that really stood out was an Italian claymation horror short called Playing God that took 7 years to finish. It’s about a clay homunculus who comes to life only to discover he’s surrounded by all the botched previous iterations of himself. The animation is truly jaw dropping (pun intended, if you watch the short!)