It’s pretty common for sports movies – the good ones, anyway – to use said sport as a metaphor for what the characters are going through off the field. It’s a standard screenwriting conceit, practically a cliché. But director Luca Guadagnino takes this to a whole new level in Challengers, a tennis movie about a love triangle defined by its ever changing power dynamics. Tennis is a sport defined by dramatic changes in momentum and elaborate personalities, filled with athletes whose skills can only be shaped into success through near psychotic dedication. Challengers is not only a good movie about tennis, but it’s also a document into the minds of those who manage to find success in it. Needless to say, it’s not a sport that lends itself to proper work-life balance.
The film is also about two men and one woman who find themselves locked into a vicious cycle of seduction, competition, and rejection. It’s stars Zendaya in the central role, as Tashi Duncan, a teenaged tennis phenom whose assured not only athletic glory but a vast, and lucrative, chance at mega stardom. Zendaya herself is already a megastar. At just 27, she’s come to define contemporary celebrity glamor. She became the youngest actress ever to win an Emmy for her lead role in Euphoria, but her movie roles are almost all limited to three Tom Holland Spider-Man movies and the two Dunes. Challengers is the first time that she is opening a movie solely on the force of her star power, no help from previously successful IP. It’s an adult film about adult relationships, a real-time maturation of her brand.
As Tashi, Zendaya is ferocious, leaning heavily into her character’s maniacal intensity for competition. When we meet her, she’s sitting in the stands watching her husband, Grand Slam champion Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), play the final in a regional professional tennis competition. His opponent? Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), a former friend of both of them. As the story begins, we don’t know their history but Guadagnino infuses the match with a tension that tells us there is more at stake than the big cardboard check for $700,000. Thirteen years earlier, all three were teenagers on the junior circuit. Art and Patrick were best friends and a doubles team that won the US Open. The bigger star, though, is Tashi, whose dominant juniors career projects mammoth professional opportunity, on and off the court.
The movie’s script cleverly cuts back and forth between the regional final and the trio’s longer history together, a decade-plus of attraction and betrayal, winning and losing. The script is written by Justin Kuritzkes, his first produced screenplay. A lot of press has been made of his marriage to filmmaker Celine Song, whose Past Lives was not only one of the best films of 2023, but another tale about a woman caught in between her feelings for two men – the kind of coincidence that feels too intimate to be an accident. Kuritzkes’s script is a much more contrived affair, less auto-fictional. His eye for detail within tennis (perhaps more detail than the actual characters get) goes a ways toward maximizing the story’s cinematic potential. Kuritzkes’s gift is for snappy dialogue and structure, if not depth.
As a director, Guadagnino is exciting in his refusal to commit to a singular style or genre. In Suspiria and Bones and All, we got emotionally vulnerable horror; with Call Me By Your Name and I Am Love, we got lush romanticism. Challengers‘s most direct antecedent is probably his 2015 film A Bigger Splash, another movie about people using sexuality as one of many tools to manipulate and exploit. With Zendaya’s immense popularity, this feels like Guadagnino’s biggest swing for the mainstream, but the film still pulsates with the sexual energy (both straight and queer) that has become one of his few calling cards. This is a spectacularly directed movie, in both its intention and skill. The way he shoots tennis will turn off purists of the sport, but it is certainly unique in its visceral energy.
That energy plays out equally in the scenes off the court. The standout being a scene in a hotel room where the three characters, as curious but awkward teenagers, share spicy conversation followed by a makeout session that becomes more than just boy-girl. Afterward, Tashi tells them that whoever wins the junior final between the two of them the next morning will get her number. It’s the first time that she will turn the two friends against one another, foreshadowing things to come. Over the next thirteen years, Art and Patrick will play the same match for Tashi in different ways that will test their well-rooted friendship. When Tashi’s knee blows out before she even makes it to the pros, her life feels hopeless. She has security in the sweet and safe Art, but gets excitement from the raw and feckless Patrick. Neither of them can give her the game of tennis back, but she’ll get that edge by watching them try.
Driving everything, more than Zendaya, Faist, or O’Connor – perhaps even more than Guadagnino – is a score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The duo have produced some of the most iconic film scores of the last fifteen years, but Challengers feels like a new height for them. The contrast between their pulsing techno beats and their warmer, intimate motifs is a staple, but that contrast grows even heavier here. As conversations evolve into argument, Guadagnino turns the music up, the dialogue almost inaudible. The choice highlights the inherent lustfulness that lies underneath every exchange, and the ways all three of them exploit the upper hand when given to them. It’s a beautiful, exciting piece of music that will be added to an already impressive resume.
Faist, the stage actor whose film breakout came with Spielberg’s West Side Story remake in 2021, gets his first big film role since then. Playing Art, the film’s least dynamic character, is a difficult task, but Faist expertly plays the thinly-concealed resentment and envy. Art has the money and the singles titles, but Patrick has the charm and confidence that he’s never possessed. O’Connor’s Patrick is an astounding character, a guy who rode his talent without honing his skill. Forced to sleep in his car when he’s unable to seduce a tinder date into letting him crash, Patrick still can get the drop on Art with a racket and with a girl. Between this and La Chimera, O’Connor has proven to be an actor of incredible vigor and force. His menacing grin is the closest Challengers gets to a villain, and also the closest it gets to a hero.
The two actors are planets revolving at relative velocities around Zendaya’s sun. The strength with which she carries this film is so absolute and effortless that you could almost take it for granted. She plays the physical and the emotional on the same beat: strident and unapologetic, brief glimpses of vulnerability. It’s a gamble for an actor whose star rose in a time when adults only want things that remind them of their childhood. Challengers is about the mess that comes with being horny, whether that be horny for sex or horny for adrenaline. Gen Z has been outspoken about its disinterest in the explicit. It’s all to say that if we can’t make a hit out of a movie like this (original, superbly acted, expertly crafted, overtly sexy) then all may be lost.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino