Luca Guadagnino’s mind is a wonderful, slightly terrifying place.
To think that the Italian director has made films as disparate and idiosyncratic as Suspiria, Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and now Challengers is as intoxicatingly exciting as it is fascinating. And he’s not showing any signs of slowing down either, taking on a slew of new projects for the foreseeable future, including a Mexico City-set historical romantic drama film with Daniel Craig that’s expected to premiere in the festival circuit as early as this Fall.
It’s equally thrilling that Challengers is Justin Kuritzkes’ first feature film screenplay. His wife, Celine Song, also made her writing and directing debut in Challengers‘ more introspective and sincere threesome sibling, 2023’s Past Lives.
Challengers is an absolute triumph, marked by what is arguably the best work to date by everyone involved, from Guadagnino and Kuritzkes to casting director Francine Maisler and score composers Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography, Merissa Lombardo’s production design, and J. W. Anderson’s costume design add the final touches to a salacious, rambunctious, and decadently stylish movie for the ages.
The package of the film (the way it looks and plays out on screen) is glossy, intense, and sexy, keeping you tuned into every move just by virtue of its leading trio’s chemistry and the way Guadagnino captures it on camera. But what makes Challengers a Grand Slam is the meat, the filling. Kuritzkes’s character work in the duplicitous Tashi (Zendaya), the submissive Art (Mike Faist), and the unreliable Patrick (Josh O’Connor) is an infinite well of possibilities, allowing for a multitude of interpretations and dissections of these three people’s motivations, aspirations, self-sabotaging tendencies, and clashing egos. It’s intoxicating.
The film develops along two parallel timelines: In the present, Art and Patrick prepare to face off in a Challenger Tour tournament final as Tashi watches on from the stands, a visible scar on her knee from a career-ending injury peeking through her baby blue dress. Then Guadagnino takes us 12 years into the past to begin to lay out the knotty, sweaty events that have led the trio to that highly charged moment in New Rochelle.
Young best friends Art and Patrick are attending a junior tournament when they meet teen protegé, Tashi Duncan, who is already being marketed as tennis’ next big star. The two are instantly enamored by her ferociousness on the court and sensuality on the dance floor. Considering the object of their desires is Zendaya, it’s insanely easy to bite into their transfixion. The boys invite her over to their bedroom and the three almost engage in a three-way tryst, interrupted only by Tashi after she successfully proves her point about Art and Patrick’s latent interest in one another. It’s the beginning of a complicated, manipulative, lustful, and emotionally tumultuous decade-spanning love triangle, cleverly translated by Guadagnino into the evolution of that initial/final confrontation.
The way the form of Challengers (its acts, its dialogues, and even its camera movements) mimics a tennis match is nothing short of delicious. Guadagnino’s vision for Kuritzkes’s remarkably rich characters and the dynamics that they share is as clear as it is inspired — he was the only man for this job.
Challengers is a movie about sex and power, and there’s so much power in the way Guadagnino frames his cast’s innate sexuality without showing a single sex scene in the entirety of the film’s runtime. The sexiest scenes are often those where the characters barely touch — it’s the tension created from their desperate necessity and desire to touch that actually drives the film’s erotic charge. It’s masterful.
Tennis, in truth, is a metaphor for human relationships. As Tashi describes early on, a tennis match requires that the two players be completely engaged with one another, blocking out the rest of the world, and focusing solely on their opponent. There’s an obsession with and attraction to your court partner that is intrinsic to the game of tennis and which functions as the key to the entire film. Each decision made by Tashi, Art, and Patrick is essentially a shot in a match, and as each of the men attempts to gradually win each game, and then each set, it all builds up to a closely contested final match point that Guadagnino crafts into one of the most memorable third acts in 21st-century moviemaking — and that is true for both the tennis itself and all the sex, betrayal, and heartbreak it signifies.
Challengers‘ biggest victory, however, is the way it involves each of the three players proportionally in the unfolding of its story. The heterosexual love triangle has been absolutely exhausted in the past, but, as you’d expect, Guadagnino brings a queer sensitivity to his threesome that transforms a tired trope into an electric, alive thing that could evolve any which way at any point. While an even bigger step in that direction would have possibly made Challengers perfect, the fact that the possibility is there alone increases its agitation and complexity tenfold. Art, Tashi, and Patrick dance with and around each other through the years as they sink into an increasingly toxic and self-harmful entanglement that is both killing them and keeping them afloat.
There is so much duplicity, ambiguity, secrecy, and manipulation at the center of Art, Tashi, and Patrick’s relationship from the very first moment the boys lay eyes on their muse, that it becomes virtually impossible to decipher their choices, but all the more fun to try. On the surface, they’re all one thing, but as the film and the tennis match of life evolve, they each reveal small clues about their personalities that could fuel a thousand theories. It’s like catnip for overreaders.
This sophistication of character, we assume, was not an easy task for the leading trio, but they handled it like pros. Zendaya was perfectly cast as the irresistible Tashi, bringing a disarming superficial innocence to an otherwise cunning and calculated woman. She toys around with the two men that she holds in the palm of her hand, yet you never can turn against her, because their obsession and lack of shame are often too pathetic to feel defensive over, especially because Art and Patrick do their fair share of manipulation, too. O’Connor’s Patrick and Faist’s Art play so well off of Zendaya’s Tashi, but better yet off of one another — a scene they share in a fittingly steamy sauna is a highlight in the film, and their chemistry is sizzling enough to travel across an entire tennis court.
It’s truly never been more fun to watch three people be absolutely despicable to one another than in Luca Guadagnino’s tennis court love story. Challengers is a 2024 must-watch, and possibly the year’s sleekest, most vibrant film. Now, excuse me while I go drive my neighbors insane by blasting Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score at full volume on my speakers.
