Challengers is a winner. Game, sex, match. | review and analysis

Challengers follows a decade-long love triangle between three would-be tennis stars that culminates in a match nearly as intense as their entanglement.

Challengers tells the story of a decade-long deliciously messy love triangle that is as quick and thrilling as a tennis match and crazy, sexy, cool as the best erotic thrillers. Rapidly volleying between the past and present, director Luca Guadagnino keeps a light and fun tone thanks to a stellar heart-pumping score and clever editing even as the competition (both tennis and for the heart) gets heated. With a trio of perfectly-matched performances with Zendaya further cementing her start status and Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist building on their already impressive work, Challengers is as engrossing, entertaining and delightful as they come. A crowd-pleaser that’ll have you on your feet asking for more.

To call Challengers a romance would be both apt — it is about love and relationships after all — and underplaying just how deliciously messy the love triangle at its center becomes. The plot isn’t particularly shocking, unless you consider a well-placed drop shot a twist. But the increasingly debauched ways that each of the three corners of the triangle tangle, using their pasts and understanding of their psychologies against each other, are constantly satisfying even if you know what’s coming.

That’s because Challengers builds to every moment with incredible precision knowing exactly where to hit and how hard for maximum effect.

So when Zendaya’s tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan turns a three-way make-out with best friends and tennis partners Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) in a dingy motel room during the 2006 Junior U.S. Open Championships into a two-way make-out between the two boys, it’s not only devilishly sweet, it’s exactly where we wanted them to end up.

It all comes back to Justin Kuritzkes’s ingenious screenplay that frames the rocky history between the three would-be tennis stars with what should be a low-stakes match between Art and Patrick that instead becomes a metaphor for their volatile friendship. Each time a point is scored during the match or there’s a particularly intense volley, the movie flashes back to a moment in the entanglement that has the exact same result. Except rather than a point they win Tashi.

It’s not pedantic as it sounds, but the feeling it evokes has all the intensity and suspense of any tennis match.

When we first meet Tashi and Art they are married. He a tennis pro in a rut and Tashi his scrupulous coach. To help him gain his confidence back, she enters him into a U.S. Open Qualifier hilariously sponsored by Phil’s Tire Town in the very unglamorous town of New Rochelle, New York. It should be a walk in the park for Art, that is until he realizes that Patrick is also in the challenger.

In flashbacks, Art is portrayed as the more serious of the two. He sees tennis as a serious sport. Something to be mastered. Patrick, on the other hand, with a sly grin often laying back with manspreading as wide as possible, believes you either have it or you don’t. It’s that kind of teenaged dirtbag posturing (the he never really shakes even as an adult) that pushes him to unabashedly pursue Tashi at a post-tournament party at the 2006 Junior Opens. However, Tashi, as tactical and strategic in love as she is on the court, can immediately pick up on the dynamic between the pair — and exploits that by pitting them against each other. Both psychologically and literally when she says she’ll give her number to whoever wins the Men’s Singles Final during the tournament.

Zendaya plays Tashi with an easy confidence that captures you as much as it it captures the boys. Her charisma mixed a knowing wit is irresistible.

Her performance is as much of a technical marvel as the well-captured tennis matches. From the start of the triangle, she is in complete control. Not because she wants to be, but because she knows she can. It’s what’s fascinating about the underlying fascination Challengers has with relationships. Like last year’s Fair Play, the movie presupposes that relationships are as much about power as they are emotion. Whether or not there is actually love between Tashi, Art and Patrick isn’t the question. It’s how the tension — both sexual and psychological — drives their decisions.

In the present, Art is on the precipice of retiring at a low point in his career. An emasculating decision that puts strain on his relationship with Tashi as both wife and coach. With so much of their relationship tied up in tennis, how can they go on without it? The subtext: how can she love him without it? On the other hand, Patrick’s unpredictability, that makes him less malleable for Tashi’s uses, also makes him more attractive. It’s those opposing and attracting forces that make the movie drives the movie’s tension through the roof. Even without sex scenes — most end before or pick up after — the eroticism is palpable.

However, Guadagnino brilliantly uses the visceral and immersive tennis scenes as the movie’s proxy for sex.

He captures sweat falling, muscles flexing and strained grunting in glorious high definition slow motion that is as captivating as it is gorgeous to look at — for more reasons than one. Guadagnino wrings out the proverbial cinematic rag and switches from player POVs to slow-motion to quick cuts to a stunning tennis ball POV that has the audience literally volleyed between the two players. All the while, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘s thumping electronic score — their best since The Social Network — keeps the momentum going. Along with the crispest ball hitting racket sounds, Challengers is an immersive cinematic experience worthy of seeing on the biggest screen possible (find your local IMAX or Dolby Theater immediately).

However, every single shot is charged. Even though Art and Patrick’s relationship is platonic, there’s something so romantic and even erotic about the way they taunt and chide each other — and of course hit balls.

Challengers feels like a movie we haven’t seen before, or at least in recent memory. One that doesn’t feel bogged down by its self-importance nor trying so hard to be shocking or camp (I’m looking at you, Saltburn). Guadagnino simply has fun with Justin Kuritzkes’s brilliant screenplay and uses each of his three actors exactly as they should. Zendaya is the movie star of a generation. Mike Faist is the steady straight man. Josh O’Connor is a scene-stealer with one of the most complex storylines of all. And at the very least, it’s a blast.

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Challengers is a winner. Game, sex, match. | review and analysis
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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.