If there’s one thing audiences seemed to take away from the trailer for Challengers, the new tennis-based drama from director Luca Guadagnino, it’s that there would be a threesome happening in this movie. That could be the only natural progression of the scene where Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor take turns french-kissing Zendaya before simultaneously sucking on her neck on a hotel bed.
Well, my friends, I’m here to confirm whisperings about Challengers that have been making the rounds: there is no threesome, and this is a film largely much tamer than presumptive trailer analyzers had led themselves to believe, at least in terms of any controversial provocations. Though, as far as the heated emotions running through the veins of the blazing love triangle the film centers itself on, it’s just as fiercely and sexually charged as anyone could possibly want.
Challengers begins with the clear signs of a strained relationship between Art Donaldson (Faist) and Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a husband-and-wife who were once each a pro tennis powerhouse, with Tashi now a former women’s tennis prodigy resigned to coaching the still-active Art, who’s stuck amid a career-halting losing streak. Tashi does the only thing she can think of: sign Art up to play a podunk, low-level Challenger tournament to hopefully win and potentially gain some of his confidence back. The only problem is the unexpected hiccup of who he has to play against to win the tournament: Patrick Zweig (O’Connor), Art’s former childhood best friend and tennis comrade, as well as Tashi’s former boyfriend.
The film spends its runtime communicating the emotional stakes of this match-up, using the present-day game as the anchor story that connects a series of flashbacks that gradually flesh out the complicated tangle of love, jealousy, betrayal, resentment, and codependency that exists between the men on either side of the net and the woman in the stands looking back and forth between them as they intensely sweat and fiercely volley balls back and forth across the court. In using the typical signifiers of an underdog sports drama, the story leverages these elements as a launching for a twisted and knotty character drama where an intense game of tennis is more of a metaphorical stand-in for years of pent-up emotion.
For so many films whose stories are sucked free of immediacy or stakes because of a clumsily implemented flashback structure, Challengers thrives on its constant back and forth between past and present. Editor Marco Costa helps Guadagnino capitalize on the specific rhythms carried by writer Justin Kuritzkes's script, where every return back to that chief tennis match is carried with the additional weight of newfound information and clarity of the history between the characters involved in it. We watch as an innocent rivalry between two friends over the same girl turns into a ruinous conflict that enacts a sharp divide between them, each guilty of projecting their own desires and competitive nature—perhaps over one another—onto a woman, as well as how that woman weaponizes their infatuation with her to serve her own ambitions and desires. It’s magnificent in all of its messy, tangled turmoil.
Guadagnino has proven himself quite the omnivorous director (and quite the prolific, with him signing on or otherwise showing interest in a bevy of future features), from works that include an arty remake of a euro-horror classic with Suspiria, a queer age-gap relationship drama with Call Me By Your Name, another entangled drama in A Bigger Splash, and a nostalgic Americana cannibal love story in Bones and All (starring Zendaya’s Dune co-star Timothee Chalamet). While he resists any pure stylistic tics that make any individual film stand out as a Guadagnino picture, his films are always upheld by a distinctly authentic and well-considered sense of character dynamics and handsomely mounted visuals. That latter point is exceedingly present here, together with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom working to craft thrilling, original tennis sequences and beautiful smaller character moments. It feels like only a director like Guadagnino could sell you on the inherent romance of holding a loved one close under the soft, romantic glow of a street lamp in an Applebee’s parking lot, or convince you that including shots from the point-of-view of the chaotic tennis ball during the climactic game is a good inclusion. The film just makes this stuff work.
That’s partially due to a welcome sense of energy that carries this 2+ hour film to the finish line, aided by a sharp, witty script and performers who understand the ins and outs of these characters. The central trio are all dynamite but, in particular, this is a career-best performance for Zendaya, someone whom I’ve never been completely sold on as an actress until now. She gives Tashi’s ceaseless ambition and cold calculation an engaging quality of sly humor and cunning, the line between where she’s deliberately playing the two boys like a fiddle or getting lost within the contradictions of her own emotions occasionally left admirably ambiguous. This is a film where discerning what, or who, each character actually wants is a game in and of itself.
I’ve gone far too long without mentioning the invigorating electronic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the pulsating and throbbing beat of which plays under dialogue scenes with an energy that makes them feel like highly choreographed action sequences. It makes scenes that could read as deliberately heightened melodrama instead act as caustic sequences of the battle of wills and determination, constantly driving the conflicted trio to their final destination, an impassioned finale that resolves character throughlines through cutthroat physicality as opposed to neatly tied-up dialogue rectification.
This could be of contention to some viewers, as could the fact that the runtime is slightly long in the tooth with the flashback structure becoming perhaps needlessly convoluted and jumbled by the time the third act rolls around. But as a film that successfully survives on the potency and heat of the unbridled tension devouring the lives of its main characters, and the fervency with which it’s delivered, it’s hard to ask Challengers for much more. No, not even a threesome.