VERDICT: Luca Guadagnino’s twisty, sexy, adult tennis saga entwines three players who understand each other (and themselves) on the court but have a harder time working outside the lines.
Erotically charged, intricately plotted, and breathlessly stylish, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers delivers pleasure at every turn, with a trio of high-powered performances from Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor complementing every solid move from the filmmaking team, right down to the clothes on their backs. It’s a collective simmer of sight, sound, sweat, and sensation about fascinating, complex people pushed through their paces on and off the court.
Debut screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes begins and ends the story throughout a single tennis match in 2019, bouncing through a series of temporal flashbacks over the previous 13 years. The thrilling results are pure cinema: protagonists are both larger than life and recognizably human, and the mind/body lives of athletes are given space to be something more than one-dimensional sites of inspiration.
Guadagnino’s attention to the physical is equal opportunity when it comes to his male and female leads, and as breathtakingly captured by the director’s frequent collaborator, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Memoria), Challengers becomes something like a dare — a rare film that addresses its audience on both the intellectual and the sexual plane.
When we first meet them in 2006, Art (Mike Faist, West Side Story) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor, La Chimera) are longtime school chums who have risen to the highest ranks of junior tennis, winning the men’s doubles tournament at the US Open and set to compete against each other in the singles. Patrick has agreed to let Art win the next day’s final, but that’s before they meet Tashi (Zendaya), whom they watch compete in the women’s finals. Her style of play — both balletic and aggressive — gives both young men an erotic charge, and they each set out to win her attention.
And so begins a years-long dance that will bring all of them into and out of each other’s lives, professionally, romantically, and sexually. (Challengers deserves credit for being the rare love-triangle movie that makes the not-entirely-platonic friendship between the two guys as important as their respective feelings for Tashi.) “Tennis isn’t a game,” Tashi observes early on, “it’s a relationship,” and their relationships with each other will reach a culmination of sorts on that court in 2019, where their gameplay accomplishes everything they can’t put into words.
One of the many joys of Challengers is in the way that playwright Kuritzkes’ masterful script unfolds, divulging and withholding information at precisely the right moments, intensifying the nuances of this love story. And tennis itself is no mere backdrop: specific actions, lines of dialogue, and character motivations repeat themselves throughout the film from differing perspectives — served from the other side of the net, perhaps — while digging into the fragility and brevity of an athletic career. They come up together, work together, go to bed together, and battle each other, sometimes all at once. Even when years and careers spin them out of each other’s orbits, they remain inextricably linked.
Perspiration has rarely been as sexy as it is in the hands of Guadagnino and Mukdeeprom, whether it’s beads of sweat pouring off the players in slow motion or Patrick simultaneously flirting with and psychologically overpowering Art by confronting him in a sauna with no towel around his waist. Contemporary cinema tends to shy away from the power and the possibilities of sexuality, but here, sex and its occasional weaponization become an essential component of the power dynamics being played out on and off the court.
The leads innately understand their characters — what makes them powerful, where their vulnerabilities lie — and they play off each other with savage grace. This is one of the richest, most mature characters Zendaya has had the opportunity to play on the big screen, and she revels in the opportunity to push herself to new places as an actress. Faist and O’Connor have the magnetism of movie stars, but they’re both character-actor enough to disappear into roles, so much so that audiences might not necessarily recognize them from film to film, which is a unique gift.
This trio’s interactions will reward multiple viewings, not just for the erotic frisson that they draw out of each other but also for the subtle shadings of how they manipulate and are manipulated. (There’s also plenty to uncover in watching them age from high school to early 30s, from the specifics of posture and body movement to details of hair, makeup, and Jonathan Anderson’s of-the-moment costume design.) And while the performances deliver plenty of pulse-pounding, so does the throb-heavy electronic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which Guadagnino employs at unexpected moments, including over conversations.
Guadagnino, one of contemporary cinema’s most ardent sensualists, makes viewers feel every thwack of the ball and every hair raised on the necks of these passionate athletes. Challengers is a feat of narrative, of visual aesthetics, and of cinematic exhilaration.
