‘Challengers’ Review – Zendaya Is at Her Best in This Ridiculously Horny Delight

The Big Picture

• Challengers
  is a love triangle set in the world of tennis, featuring three of Hollywood’s best up-and-comers.
• The film delves into the characters’ pasts to explain their futures, exploring relationships and hidden scars.
• Zendaya delivers a powerful performance, while the film blends tension, sexuality, and storytelling seamlessly.

On the surface, Challengers looks like the most conventional and straightforward film of Luca Guadagnino’s career. Coming off the horror-romance Bones and All, the coming-of-age TV miniseries We Are Who We Are, and the bonkers update of Dario Argento with Suspiria, Challengers almost seems quaint in comparison. Frankly, a love/lust triangle set in the world of tennis starring three of Hollywood’s best up-and-comers doesn’t scream “Luca Guadagnino.” However, in a way, Challengers almost feels like a throwback to Guadagnino’s pre-Call Me by Your Name work, with films like I Am Love and A Bigger Splash, which wholly relied on the dynamics between its characters, their romantic entanglements within, and the internal machinations of these characters. It’s also one of the twistiest, most compelling, and nonstop horniest films of Guadagnino’s career—which is truly saying something.

What Is ‘Challengers’ About?

Despite seeming like a story about a love triangle, Challengers begins with Tashi (Zendaya), a promising tennis player turned coach, with her husband Art (Mike Faist), who is a Grand Slam champion in the middle of a losing streak. To boost Art’s confidence, Tashi signs her husband up for a lower-ranking Challenger tournament (sponsored by Phil’s Tire Town, no less), thinking that a few easy wins might help him in this rut. However, also at this event is Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who used to be Art’s doubles partner and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend. As these two compete against each other for the first time in years, we look back at what led up to this match and the relationships that still have an impact on all three of these tennis players.

Early on, Guadagnino’s camera gets extremely close to the bodies of our three characters, showing the scars that each of them wears from years of play. Tashi has a vertical scar running up her knee, while Art has several dings on his arms that we assume are from years of high-competition tennis. From there, Guadagnino pulls back the curtain to see the scars that they still have to struggle with inside, the loves, the losses, the pains, and the missed opportunities that made them who they are today. To Tashi, this might be a story about tennis and what it takes to win, but for Art, Patrick, and us, we know this is about much deeper scars that don’t heal quite as easily.

Guadagnino, working with an excellent script by Justin Kuritzkes, unfurls the past to explain the future. Challengers soon goes back thirteen years, as we see these three as exciting new athletes. Art and Patrick are best friends, even known as Fire & Ice by many, who both are drawn to Tashi’s incredible tennis gifts and her beauty. The first time they watch her play, the rest of the crowd moves their heads back and forth between players, but Art and Patrick can’t take their eyes off her. As they both set their sights on Tashi, her focus remains on tennis, and she’ll do what it takes to watch some “good fucking tennis,” as she puts it. Whether or not she’s interested in these two players, or if she wants to pit them against each other to get that “good fucking tennis” going is part of what makes Challengers so exciting to watch throughout.

‘Challengers’ Love Triangle Excels Because of Its Three Lead Performances

This is quite possibly Zendaya’s finest performance so far, one that allows her to be powerful, sexy, and a puppet master of sorts—all in equal measure. She knows the influence she has and utilizes it in every scene. While Art and Patrick don’t hide their intentions, clearly motivated more by what’s in their pants than their tennis skill, Tashi keeps her feelings close to the chest, and that inability to read her in most situations makes her a fascinating character to behold. As a tennis player, she knows she’s great and has her future lined up for her, but when that tremendous career is taken away from her in a moment, she employs this power in an entirely different fashion. She still has long-term goals, she just has to use manipulation and careful strategy to achieve them. In every scene, we’re right there alongside Art and Patrick, trying to decode what she’s really trying to do, and Zendaya plays this role with brilliance and grace.

It’s also a delight to see Faist and O’Connor in this form, with performances that are playful and unbelievably horny. They’re so much fun to watch together in their early scenes as kids, and as we see this relationship transform over their careers, they are also able to present the complicated feelings they have towards each other and Tashi with that same level of excitement and intensity. While this is a love triangle, it’s also probably more about the love that these two share for each other, and whether or not that love is entirely platonic is up for discussion.

These feelings for each other lead to some of the steamiest moments in a movie this year, electric and sexually charged until everyone seems like might spontaneously combust. After watching Tashi play for the first time, Art and Patrick invite her back to their shared hotel room, where we begin to see how affecting Tashi is in this relationship. Guadagnino builds the tension in these scenes, as we’re just as unsure as any of these three where this is actually going to head. We learn about this trio naturally, as they discuss their pasts while heavily flirting, while we sit on the edge of our seats wondering where this key moment in their lives is going to end up. Challengers’ wears its overwhelming sexuality on its sleeve, as another scene has Patrick and Art sitting extremely close to each other, aggressively eating churros in each other’s vicinity—and eating each other’s churros as well. The film is so overt in its double entendres that it becomes part of the intentional humor, an unusual air that hangs over every scene.

But that’s all part of the fun in Guadagnino’s latest, and he revels in this brazen desire and sensuality in pretty much every scene. So much of what makes Challengers a compelling watch is the way this film pairs these three off, focusing on the dynamic between two of them at any given time. Sure, it can be giddily silly and over-the-top like in the aforementioned scene of cinnamon-sugar pastries, but it’s also fascinating to watch the shifts in power over the span of years. A tense tennis match or an extremely charged night between the three of them is just as gripping to watch as seeing Zendaya shifting any conversation towards tennis, or watching how these two men undermine and manipulate each other in small ways to get what they want. Each scene is a brilliant one-on-one game in its own way, and this excitement only builds the further the film progresses through its timeline.

‘Challengers’ Is an Excellent Mystery to Be Explored, Thanks to Luca Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes

Challengers, even with its twisty entanglements, could’ve been a much more straightforward affair, yet it isn’t due to the incredible filmmaking on display. Kuritzkes’ script liberally flies back and forth through time, exploring the present by expanding the future consistently. Yet Kuritzkes’ narrative never manages to get overwhelmed by this constant shifting. As we see an action within the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger that seems unusual, Kuritzkes goes back to explore the origins of that strange quirk, almost as if he’s a detective hunting for the clues to what led to this current situation. But again, this is a strength because of how seamlessly it all works, making the past and the present tie into one natural story being told.

But naturally, this wouldn’t work without Guadagnino’s careful hand and editor Marco Costa’s incredible job at making sure this convoluted story doesn’t become too much to handle. Guadagnino knows how to build tension in every scene, whether it’s an unbearable lust that our characters can’t seem to shake, or the intensity of a tennis match where seemingly anything can happen. This is also aided by the thumping, escalating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that builds up during the tennis scenes, while Guadagnino puts us right alongside the players, often bouncing us along like we’re the tennis ball going across the court.

But amongst all the twisty relationship drama, the will-they-won’t-they questioning, and the intense tennis matches at the heart of the film, Challengers is also just ridiculously fun. Guadagnino and Kuritzkes makes each scene a joy to watch unravel, as it shifts what we know about these three in each moment. It’s unclear what the endgame is until it’s right upon us, and it’s easy to ignore any allegiances or desires we have for these characters and just watch to see where the hell they go next. Every scene becomes an exchange of power in a way that puts you on the edge of your seat, whether it’s an absurdly sexy argument in a dorm room before a big match or two people having a conversation before bed. The excitement here isn’t on the tennis court, but rather, in the way words and ideas are lobbed at each other like weapons.

‘Challengers’ Is Classic Guadagnino

While a sports film might seem like a grand deviation from Guadagnino’s other films, his features usually play out like those movies already: a grand building to a conclusion that is both exciting and rewarding—especially if it’s unexpected. Take, for example, the head-exploding conclusion to Suspiria, which ends on such a wild, shocking note that you have to pick your jaw off the ground. Or the tragic endings to Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All, which can tear your heart out, but also feel like natural points for these stories to end, given what we’ve seen. The same is true of Challengers, but in a more extended fashion, as it builds and builds with tension, as we wait to see the result of the New Rochelle Challenger Presented by Phil’s Tire Town. Guadagnino’s films have often have the build, excitement, and tension of a sports film, so Challengers fits right into the director’s filmography perfectly.

This ends up feeling like a culmination of Guadagnino’s talents, all wrapped up into a film that seems like his most commercial project yet on paper. We have the absurd build in passion that we saw in something like Call Me by Your Name, mixed with the unpredictability of a film like Bones and All, and the build to a remarkable conclusion that ended Suspiria with a bang. But it’s also tied into the complicated character-focused dramas that Guadagnino began his features career with. It’s simply gratifying to watch Guadagnino combine all of his skills into this one immensely entertaining project.

Challengers is a wild love triangle story, punctuated by three excellent performances and tremendous talent behind the camera. This is a film that could’ve easily been more conventional and lascivious in its approach, yet Guadagnino’s handling of Kuritzkes’ screenplay makes this into something far greater. Simply put, Challengers is quite a serve.

Challengers is now available to stream on MGM+ In the U.S.

WATCH ON MGM+