Supergirl (2026) Review - The DCU Goes to Space
Supergirl, based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s acclaimed Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic miniseries, is a film about a young woman who has survived something terrible and responded to that survival not with heroism but with avoidance – planet-hopping for parties, nursing hangovers under red suns where she can finally feel drunk, and deliberately staying small and aimless in a universe that has not given her much reason to aspire to anything larger. She is the anti-Superman: where her cousin Clark is earnest, purposeful, and possessed of an uncomplicated relationship to doing good, Kara is cynical, self-destructive, and deeply uncertain whether any of it matters.
The film introduces her almost exactly as Superman left her – when she drunkenly crashed the Fortress of Solitude to retrieve her equally-superpowered dog, Krypto – and picks up as she’s celebrating her 23rd birthday, somewhere in the galaxy under a red sun, with the particular grim dedication of someone who has been running from herself for a long time. What interrupts this extended exercise in self-erasure is Ruthye, a girl played by Eve Ridley who is seeking revenge on the vicious Brigands who murdered her parents. Supergirl, who runs afoul of this same crew when their ruthless and eccentric leader Krem of the Yellow Hills poisons Krypto, finds herself aligned with Ruthye’s mission out of necessity – she has three days to track Krem down, retrieve the antidote, and save her dog. What begins as a personal errand becomes, with the accumulated weight of everything Ruthye represents, something considerably more.
The pairing of Kara and Ruthye is the film’s most successful creative decision. Ruthye is, in some respects, the character Kara might have become if she had channeled her grief differently – focused, purposeful, and consumed by a righteous anger that gives her existence a clear direction. Watching Kara navigate her relationship with this girl, who needs her and who also, in her determination and clarity of purpose, implicitly challenges everything about the way Kara has been living, gives Milly Alcock the emotional terrain the film needs her to cover.
Alcock is the film’s defining achievement. She has already demonstrated her skill across her work in House of the Dragon and other projects, and here she brings that quality to bear on a character whose central challenge is that she resists being read. She does the right thing, consistently, but without the warmth or the faith in humanity that makes her cousin so obviously compelling as a hero. Her heroism costs her something. It is not yet accompanied by the belief that it is worth what it costs. Alcock makes this legible in every scene without ever explaining it, which is the harder and more impressive achievement.
The film’s tonal ambitions are clear from its opening frames – Guardians of the Galaxy’s offbeat humor, Mad Max’s gritty kinetic energy, and a genre register that is closer to True Grit if it was a space opera rather than to a conventional superhero film. Director Craig Gillespie handles these elements with a confident looseness that serves the material well. The action sequences are inventive, the visual language of Kara’s interplanetary world is rendered with genuine creative investment, and the film moves at a pace that respects both its own action mechanics and its more emotionally demanding passages.
Jason Momoa’s debut as Lobo is a small but perfectly calibrated piece of casting. The gonzo cosmic biker – cigar-chomping, over-the-top, a force of chaos barely contained by even the loosest narrative structure – fits Momoa’s particular energy, and the film is wise enough to use him sparingly, giving audiences a taste rather than a full portion. The anticipation his introduction generates for where this character might go in the expanding DCU is considerable.
David Corenswet’s Superman appears in a handful of scenes, and each one does exactly what it needs to do – cementing the character’s central place in this new universe while demonstrating, through contrast, exactly what distinguishes Kara from her cousin. Clark’s ease with his identity, his comfort with being seen, his uncomplicated goodness: all of it reads differently next to Kara’s wariness and resistance. The family resemblance is visible. The differences are more interesting.
The film’s weaknesses are real, if manageable. Matthias Schoenaerts’ Krem is the most significant: a largely one-note presence whose menace never fully materializes into genuine threat. A more fully realized antagonist would have given the film’s emotional stakes a sharper edge. Krypto, meanwhile, is still charming, but underused – a character with clear potential for both comedy and feeling who is essentially sidelined once the inciting incident of his poisoning has served its narrative function.
None of this prevents Supergirl from doing what it fundamentally sets out to do: establish a new character in a new universe with enough clarity, depth, and individual personality that audiences leave the theater wanting to see where she goes next. The DC Universe that James Gunn is building – Superman as its foundation, Peacemaker as a tonal experiment, and Supergirl as its first genuine expansion into the wider cosmos before Lanterns explores them further later this summer – is developing a coherence and an identity that becomes increasingly intriguing with each new release. Each entry has been distinct without being disconnected, and genre-specific without being hermetic.
Supergirl is not the best of these, but it is something more valuable in the context of franchise-building: it is a film that makes you genuinely curious about its protagonist’s future. She is not going anywhere, and the DC Universe is better for it.