‘Challengers’ Review: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist Make a Sizzling Trio in Luca Guadagnino’s Sexy Grand Slam

Smart, seductive and bristling with sexual tension, Challengers is arguably Luca Guadagnino’s most purely pleasurable film to date; it’s certainly his lightest and most playful. As agile and dynamic as the many tennis matches it depicts, the love-triangle drama pits the rivalry on the court of two former best friends against their competing desire for a self-possessed woman whose hunger to win is not diminished by a knee injury that cuts short her own career. It helps that the chemistry of stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist is off the charts.

There’s a lot to savor here, starting with the peppy dialogue of playwright Justin Kuritzkes’ auspicious first feature screenplay, full of smash serves and spry backhands. Marco Costa’s propulsive editing is key to sustaining the film’s unflagging vitality, leaving us no time to get lost in its nonlinear time jumps. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s nimble shooting style brings excitement to the matches, inventively switching up the angles to bolster the energy. And the intoxication of his camera with the leads’ physicality is entirely contagious.

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This is one of the most ravenously sexy American movies in recent memory, an aspect fueled throughout by the hard-driving beats of a hypnotic techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which recalls everything from disco-era Giorgio Moroder to the pulse-pounding EDM of the 21st century’s first two decades, when the story is set. Rather than grab a racket and hit the tennis court, this is a movie that makes you want to get up and dance. Sharp sound work is another essential element, capturing every thwack of the ball with visceral force.

The action jumps back and forth primarily between 2019 and 2006, with brief stops at various points along the way. At the start, Art Donaldson (Faist) is one of the world’s top tennis players, with a string of important international wins behind him though still chasing the U.S. Open to complete his career slam. But he’s slipped into a losing streak, so his wife and coach, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), enters him in a “Challenger” event in New Rochelle, New York. She figures that a few wins in the lower-tier professional tournament will rebuild his confidence.

What Tashi doesn’t factor on is the presence of Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). He and Art were best friends from the age of 12, when they met as roommates at a tennis academy and earned the nickname on the courts of “Fire and Ice.” But the two guys had a bitter falling out, during which Tashi switched her romantic attentions from Patrick to Art. Patrick never quite made the big leagues and is now more or less washed up, sleeping in his car and scrounging for food while counting on prize money, or at least an entrant’s fee, to get him to the next match. But once he’s facing Art across the net, his urge to win becomes more consuming.

In terms of nuts-and-bolts narrative, Challengers is relatively thin. But the psychosexual power plays keep it pinging, as do the nuances folded into the protagonists by three magnetic actors at the top of their game. Clearly, Guadagnino’s interest lies more in relationships, in the gamesmanship of desire than the sportsmanship of tennis.

When Art and Patrick first encounter Tashi she’s an 18-year-old prodigy headed to play college tennis at Stanford, where she’ll become known as “The Duncanator.” “She’s the hottest woman I’ve ever seen,” Patrick tells Art, as Tashi strides onto the court to a roar of approval from the crowd. They watch from the stands, slack-jawed with admiration — and lust — as she obliterates her German opponent. “I’d let her fuck me with a racket,” adds Patrick.

Art needs no convincing, and in a hilarious scene where they borderline stalk her at an Adidas party, they make it obvious that both of them are going after her. While Art and Patrick are still horny boys welcoming distraction, Tashi is already laser-focused on her career and deadly serious about tennis in a way that neither of them will ever approach. But she’s more than open to flirtation.

Later that same night, in the guys’ hotel room, Tashi enjoys the control she has over them, deftly coaxing out the unacknowledged homoerotic tension between them during a steamy three-way kiss. It’s a gorgeous interlude, crucial to the film’s punchy trifurcated union, with Zendaya divinely in command as Tashi keeps them guessing about which one she will choose. That’s if she even does choose one, since she half-jokingly informs them she doesn’t want to be “a homewrecker.”

What’s refreshing about it is that Art and Patrick are such a tight twosome that, at least in the early stages, there’s no one-upmanship in their respective efforts to charm her. Even in a match where they play for the privilege of dating her, the competitive edge never obscures their friendship.

While the subconscious physical attraction between the two guys gets largely nudged aside by the development of their respective relationships with Tashi, Guadagnino and the actors slyly keep that queer undercurrent in play. It’s there in every discussion between Art and Patrick, often huddled close together, not to mention in the amusing frequency with which they bite down on phallic foods – hot dogs, churros, a banana. A terrific sauna scene when their long estrangement has bred hostility is notable for the thin line separating sexual tension from cruelty.

What keeps the movie humming is the skill with which Kuritzkes’ script draws out the complications in the trio’s relationships. Despite the prolonged chill between them, Patrick knows Art well enough to recognize that he’s getting tired of the pressure and perhaps thinking about retirement. That would give Patrick an opportunity if he can persuade Tashi to coach him, granting him one last shot at restarting his stalled career.

But Tashi, the most talented and driven of the three on the court, also has her own agenda. While she refused to let her injury and resulting withdrawal from competitive tennis define her, it nonetheless feeds her resentment, giving her a thirst for victory even if it’s vicarious.

Guadagnino smoothly interweaves the action over the non-chronological 13-year arc, steadily cranking up the electricity. He makes us aware of the extent to which the fierce athleticism of tennis comes to mirror the high-stakes competition of shifting interpersonal dynamics, yet never feels the need to overstate those parallels.

This is its own kind of sports movie, and the director couldn’t ask for better collaborators than his three principals, who work up a sweat both physically and psychologically. While other figures hover on the fringes — Tashi and Art’s daughter, Tashi’s mother, a deliciously affectless umpire who makes phrases like “Code violation: Audible obscenity” into the drollest of judgements — Challengers is a three-person character study.

Unlike the haunted man stuck inside his own head that he played in Alice Rohrwacher’s bewitching La Chimera, O’Connor brings a loose swagger and a cheeky grin to Patrick, making him appealing even at his most calculating. But the actor also conveys the gnawing frustration of an underachiever still clutching onto his dream. Faist makes good on the promise he showed in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake; Art is more tightly wound than Patrick and when he feels his ambition fading, struggling to keep pace with his wife’s, the actor is unexpectedly moving.

Zendaya is the linchpin. Her work here, on the heels of Dune: Part Two, cements her status as a born Movie Star. She moves with the decisive ferocity of a warrior on the court and the floating grace of a ballerina elsewhere. (The use of slo-mo is ravishing.) Holding closeups with the effortless command of an old-school screen siren, Zendaya registers every coolly assessing glance, every flicker of apprehension, every darkening moment of disappointment or anger while seldom surrendering Tashi’s composure, even in the rare moments when her control falters.

This is a supremely stylish movie, down to the costumes of Jonathan Anderson, creative director of luxury fashion house Loewe. The sportswear is both utilitarian and chic, inevitably plastered with label endorsements on Art and more thrown-together and scruffy on Patrick, who doesn’t have the funds for pristine tennis whites. Tashi looks immaculate both on and off the court, whether she’s in slouchy loungewear or a crisp asymmetrical-collared shirtdress that will be on many wish lists. There’s never been any doubt that Guadagnino is a director with an exalted appreciation for aesthetics.

In terms of his previous output, Challengers sits closer to the moody sensuousness of A Bigger Splash than to the dizzying passion of Call Me by Your Name or the dangerous romantic spell of Bones and All. But danger is present in every rupture of the taut new movie’s triangulation, which is part of what makes it so much fun.