Challengers film review — Zendaya breaks hearts and serves in giddily carnal tennis drama

Lusty new date movie Challengers is such fun you suspect it must be illegal. The thrill is often had in inverse proportion to the characters having no fun at all. Sporting excellence leads to crushing disappointment. Hot sex turns sour. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the Italian sensualist best known for Call Me By Your Name, the film is about tennis and love. Serves are broken, then hearts. We cheer both. 

The film arrives on a wave of hype. For once, believe it. Much of the hubbub is tied up with the presence of Zendaya, an actor now ascending from standard movie stardom to the tier above. But Challengers is a group effort, and one that likes tweaking our expectations. 

So it is that her character, Tashi Duncan, might seem a support act: loyal wife of tennis legend Art Donaldson, a collector of Grand Slams played by Mike Faist (a standout in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story). But we soon learn she is also her husband’s coach — the mastermind of his success. 

Art, however, is off his game. With neat strokes, the film gets to work. A wild card is arranged to an obscure Challenger tournament, on the outskirts of pro tennis. Here, as a confidence boost, Art is to run amok among losers like mangy, ageing Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor).

Meanwhile, like many marriages, there are bodies buried in the union. A flashback the length of the movie soon shares space with action on-court, starting in 2006. (Form a queue, nostalgic millennials. They’re even playing Nelly Furtado.) 

With Challengers as smart and teasing as it is, we now meet the same characters in a new configuration. The younger Art is sweetly wide-eyed: doubles partner of goofball Patrick. Both pals share a crush on Tashi, at this point a tennis prodigy more gifted than either suitor. 

The rest explains how the trio got from there to here. Careers and couplings are shaped by cunning, ambition, and triangular randiness.

For all the star power on-screen, the script by Justin Kuritzkes spotlights itself. His three-hander is taut as a stage play, but plays cinematic games with time. Guadagnino makes a splash more subtly. The mood is so giddily carnal, you only realise later how little actual sex we see. 

And the film turns out to be a tennis movie and more than that in witty, surprising ways. Thwack-and-grunt aside, the sport gets into the stuff of the storytelling. Key lines and plot turns are made to feel like a perpetual set point. Our gaze and sympathy shifts between players. The whole thing is a nail-biter.

But the essence of the drama could be applied to boules, or rhythmic gymnastics — or any human competition. More than tennis or even sex, that is what Challengers is really about: cold calculus and ruthless drive. You could tell the same tale in the world of cut-throat young actors, though you might need another cast. Here, the three stars are a blast, but with performances held back an inch from the gnarled reality of their character’s behaviour.

My bet is that is deliberate. The ideas at the heart of the movie are dark. Fate is cruel. Glory fades. The person you love most is lying. Play all that too believably and Guadagnino’s sugar rush could soon turn bitter. Instead, he takes the cynicism, and folds it into a grand soufflé of a crowd-pleaser. Such is the mark of a winner. 

★★★★☆

In UK and US cinemas from April 26