Tashi (Zendaya) sits in the stands of the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger tennis championship match watching her husband, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) face off against Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), and she does not know who to root for.  On one hand, Art is not only her husband but also her student after she had to step back from the game due to a career-ending injury.  On the other, Patrick is an old flame of hers and a former best friend of Art’s.  As she follows the ball back and forth over the course of the game, she recalls her 13-year relationship with these two men as they competed not just on the tennis court, but also for her affection. 

Luca Guadagnino directs Challengers for MGM from a Justin Kuritzkes script.  The 131-minute film follows the dynamic ménage à trois through the various stages of their relationship which is somehow both parasitic and symbiotic.  Dressed by J.W. Anderson and with the propulsive beats of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ EDM score, Challengers is a high-energy film that breaks open the personal game of tennis and gets everyone involved.  It is a sexy and wild melodrama that would leave Douglas Sirk dizzy from the pace, but absolutely addicted to these tortured souls who have been chained to their happiness for so long that they have grown to resent it. 

The film opens in 2019 at the first set of the final round of Phil’s Tire Town Challenger before cutting a few weeks earlier to where Tashi and Art are sharing a tense breakfast; a typical routine we quickly learn.  Married with a young daughter, Lilly (A.J. Lister) and with Art struggling to get back into the major leagues after an injury, he has no time to spend at home so the family is always on the road moving from one hotel suite to the next. Tashi, in addition to working as a trainer for her husband, also runs a foundation to promote girl’s involvement in sports as well as managing the Donaldson sponsorships with various luxury brands so she similarly has little time for their daughter so care falls onto Tashi’s mother (Nada Despotovich).  As Tashi sits in the hotel suite marking up an Aston Martin proof, we learn quickly this is a woman who is used to having total control over all things, but in a rebuke to modern storytelling, Kuritzkes forgoes the voiceover – with this singular exception of an ESPN talking head to deliver some nuts and bolts exposition – and instead leans on Production Designer Merissa Lombardo to convey all of these twisting emotional details through what we see in the frame which also frees up the cast to interact directly with each other in a dynamic, and often caustic, way. 

At the center of it all is Zendaya’s Tashi, her first real leading role in a feature this large after a successful career in television and supporting roles.  She is absolutely magnetic and it is no wonder that these two goofball friends and colleagues would be instantly taken by her.  Like a fine glass of a rare whiskey, she is both dangerous and desirable, and Zendaya revels in the opportunity to be drunk with power and control.  The role is incredibly nuanced as she sets these two boys up against each other, and as she gets more and more brazen with how she is trying to tilt the outcomes in her favor, she is incredibly careful not to get backed into a corner.  As with all rises, there comes a fall and Tashi’s fall is fast and sudden, the reverberations shaking both men off of their game and like a horror movie, we cannot look away. 

She takes a bit of the backseat for the first twenty minutes or so as we follow Art; as he follows the path Tashi has laid out for him.  Similarly to Zendaya, this is a stratosphere launching role for Faist who has maintained a solid career to this point, almost always being the shining star of the cast even if not the lead.  His luster is still here in Challengers, but he is far from the only diamond in the setting.  What Faist does do, though, is navigate Art’s arc with such precision even though he is the most submissive of the bunch, and by a large margin, too.  Faist marches Art right up to the precipice of being absolutely pathetic – and had he not been so skilled on the court, he would be an incredibly pitiful character – but by wearing his heart and desires on his sleeve, we are able to chart his growth and fall in line behind him.  He presents like a puppy in a den of wolves, but that is because his scheming, albeit less than Tashi and Patrick, is done in a much quieter and sneaky way.  So much of Faist’s screentime is being beaten up and beaten down, but he makes sure that Art is always working towards something – towards Taschi – and he is more than happy to volley until it is time to strike.  This behavior pattern explodes on screen in the final match when he gets caught off guard by Patrick and then forces the game into a tiebreaker.  All along he has been getting knocked back so throwing a few points is all part of his plan to regain the advantage. 

Art could not be styled any more differently than Patrick, oil and water in their dress, mannerisms, and demeanor, but desperately they try to blend together.  They make a great show of it, for sure, but even when they are at their closest when they are high-school seniors and tennis phenomena, the friendly competition between them is, unbeknownst to them at the time, indicative of the massive shift waiting for them in the coming years.  O’Connor’s Patrick is sweaty, dirty, hairy, and crude, not even in the extreme sense, but next to the meek and pale Art, the difference is clear.  Patrick is the bad boy and Tashi is seeking the thrill and adrenaline of his live wire personality; she is not looking to be a mother, she wants to be a competitor. 

O’Connor, to his credit, is able to take the defacto antagonist of the film and really convince audiences to sympathize with him.  Partly, this is because the script is so well-balanced that we get to see these characters as fully realized people with individual motivations and desires, but O’Connor’s addictive bravado cannot be understated.  Without breaking the fourth wall, he is constantly goading us in the audience to keep our eyes on him to see what tricks he will pull out next, and we, like Tashi, fall under that spell even if we, also like Tashi, have a nagging feeling that this is not what we really want and following him too far will only spell disaster. 

This is a film that lives and dies on the chemistry of the cast, and Kuritzkes gives them a rich and lusty text to work with.  For a film that spans some 13 years and boasts multiple locations, it is pretty wild that there really are only three named characters across the runtime.  Kuritzkes focuses in on each of them, allowing them to breathe and inhabit this world and this fictional narrative while feeling so real.  It is a symptom of modern filmmaking that this story being wholly original and not based on real-life people has become such a surprise, but similar to how Todd Field crafted Lydia Tár from his own imagination her eponymous Tár (2022), the pure creativity on the page can be innately felt by audiences that this is something new, exciting, and it reminds us of what movies used to, can, and should be simply because there has been such an absence of wholly original, acclaimed adult dramas.  

Guadagnino, then, surrounds himself with an incredible team of craftspeople to bring this film to life in front of the lens and later on screen.  Sayombhu Mukdeeprom captures these bodies in motion like atoms bouncing against each other until they come crashing down and his lens then captures them heaving, panting, and sweating.  Not content with showing the games in a wide shot, he forces us onto the court and into the game with some trick shots, notably one from underneath the court looking up only before switching to the tennis ball’s point of view as we get hurled left and right and back again at incredible speed.  The Reznor and Ross score blares as O’Connor and Faist punctuate the beats with their rhythmic but somehow also frantic groans as they strike at the ball.  As if editor Marco Costa did not have a tall order ahead of him in keeping the constantly volleying timelines straight, add to it the free-for-all filmmaking of the match and it is nothing short of a miracle that any of what we have just seen is able to be made sense of.  In fact, it is almost too clean and tidy, even with the almost ambiguous ending, we are left craving just a little more chaos, a little more mess, when all is said and done.  Guadagnino cuts us off at the peak of our high, denying us one final crash.

Challengers, though, is a really incredible effort and another handsomely made film from Guadagnino who has crafted something with meticulous intention yet does not teeter into a pretentious realm, and even leaning into his European sensibilities, he keeps this story widely accessible.  One does not need to have a deep understanding of tennis, either the minutiae of the game or the flow of the competitions, but it certainly would not hurt to have that either.  Without being able to say one way or another if this is “good fucking tennis” as Tashi demands of her beaus on the eve before the final match in their younger years together, it is undeniably electric and exciting to watch on screen.  Even with the borderline excessive cutting between narratives, we are locked into every furious frame that flashes by, and in those final moments, there is little left to do but stand up and cheer.