Sports have never really been my thing, but I’ve always loved tennis. I’ve been watching it since I was about 11 years old, and though I don’t follow it religiously these days, it still holds a special place in my heart.
So when I heard that Luca Guadagnino was making a sexy tennis movie starring Zendaya, I perked up. Notable tennis movies are few and far between (Wimbledon and Battle of the Sexes are the only two that immediately come to mind), but I don’t think any have captured the sport quite like Challengers does.
I’ll say right up front: this is a weird movie. If you’re going in expecting a straightforward love triangle rom-com on the tennis courts, you might be disappointed.
The movie is centred around a single tennis match at a ‘challenger’ tournament in New Rochelle, NY. A low-stakes tournament in the scheme of things but one that ends up charged with the fraught history and relationships of our central trio of characters. Competing for the title are Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), while Art’s coach and wife (and Patrick’s ex), Tashi (Zendaya), watches from the sidelines.
With this simple setup, the movie proceeds to bounce us back and forth in time like a tennis ball, picking up more and more tidbits of the characters’ intertwined past and what led up to this final match. The time jumps can feel a bit chaotic, but I never felt overwhelmed or lost, which is a testament to how great the actors embody their characters at different stages of their lives.
All three of the leads are phenomenal, but Zendaya and Josh O’Connor are especially good. It’s hard to believe this is Zendaya’s first time really leading a movie, but boy does she ever lead. As great as Zendaya is in Dune: Part Two (check out Shea’s review here), her role here feels a lot meatier and more complicated, allowing her to really shine in her own right and not just as a love interest to a male protagonist. Ironically, given her character spends a lot of time literally on the sidelines, she’s less sidelined in this movie than she is in films like Dune or the Tom Holland Spider-Man franchise.
The way the characters interact is often unspoken. Everything is communicated through looks, glances, gestures. Tennis is a spectator sport. But while everyone watches the players, the players watch each other, so the act of looking holds a lot of power. It’s how you learn about your opponent. We all learn a lot about each other by the way we carry ourselves, our body language. And the film exploits that dynamic and uses perspective to remarkable effect.
At one point, Tashi says that “tennis is a relationship” and this right here is the movie’s thesis. In Challengers, tennis is the means through which it examines the relationships between its three central characters. As chaotic as the timeline and filmmaking is, the movie never strays its focus very far from Tashi, Art, and Patrick. It’s as precise as an ace down the line. And that’s why it works so well despite all of its loud, flashy formal elements.
But let’s talk about those formal elements for a minute. The filmmaking here is not just incredibly fun and absorbing to watch, but it’s exciting. The camerawork and editing and lighting and music are all operating at an incredibly heightened level—some of the shots and cuts are bonkers, but I couldn’t stop grinning throughout the entire movie because of how kinetic and alive the whole thing feels. I’m talking bold choices that most other filmmakers wouldn’t even think to try, let alone execute so beautifully and effectively.
Some of those over-the-top choices are a little too on the nose, and some work better (how many phallic-shaped foods can the boys eat around each other?) than others (a literal storm of emotions), but I found myself enjoying it all nonetheless.
The score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is a thrumming techno fever-dream, pulsating throughout the movie to give it electricity and life. I don’t often come back to movie soundtracks and just listen to them as I go about my day, but since leaving the theatre, I’ve been listening to the Challengers soundtrack quite a bit, because it makes me feel like I could run a marathon.
The marketing for the movie really pushed the love triangle aspect, but this is the rare love triangle in which all three sides of the triangle have sexual chemistry and tension. Art and Patrick both fall head over heels for Tashi after watching her play tennis, but they’re as much in love with each other as they are in love with Tashi. And while Tashi loves the boys, she loves tennis more than she could ever love any one person. She’s a force, and her desire for power and control is matched only by her love of the game—and, consequently, by the omnipresent weight of what she’s lost and can never get back: her ability to play it. It’s this intense tangle of desire and motivation that makes the movie so compelling to watch.
For such a sexually charged movie, it’s also notable that none of the sex scenes (or tennis matches, for that matter) ever play out to climax. We’re constantly denied the satisfaction of seeing how things finish, left to infer what happens next. It’s an incredible power move on Guadagnino’s part, but it also makes everything that much sexier. After all, for these characters, foreplay is everything. Sometimes it matters who wins what, but in the end, it’s the dance, the interplay, the unspoken conversation happening from opposite sides of the net, that excites them all. It’s in those rare moments of connection, whether on or off the court, that we can maybe reach something like understanding. Tashi describes it like so:
For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis, and we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It’s like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.
In the end, it’s not about who wins or loses, but about the beautiful places you go together.
Verdict
Challengers is over-the-top, sexy, sweaty, and surprisingly funny coming from the director of Bones and All and Call Me By Your Name. That’s probably due in part to the excellent script by Justin Kuritzkes, but everything from the performances to the soundtrack to the frenetic filmmaking come together to make this one of the most unique movies of the year so far. If you’re ready to get fired up about tennis and hot people who have complicated histories with one another, then you’ll probably have a great time with this one.
Shea Angus