“Tennis is a relationship.” Tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) utters these words as she’s stretched out by the beach, late into the evening following a party at the junior’s segment of the U.S. Open. She’s addressing Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a pair of old school friends competing as a doubles team. They watched Tashi play earlier in the day, Patrick initially excitedly telling Art to watch out for her because “she’s the hottest woman I’ve ever seen.” But they (Art especially) are just as quickly taken by the ferocity of her game. After fumbling their way into hanging out with her later, Art comments on how he’d never seen anything like it. And that’s when Tashi launches into her brief monologue that becomes the idea that the entirely of Challengers and its three leads pivots on: that relationship that forms on the court when you are so in sync with the person you are playing against that two sides become one.
Director Luca Guadagnino demonstrates the tangled nature of this threesome on and off the court— her and him, him and her, and him and him— through his careful compositions. In this beach scene, and the next one, where Tashi takes Patrick up on his offer to visit them later and the trio continue to talk, lounging on the beer can-strewn floor of the boys’ hotel room— Guadagnino positions Patrick and Art on one side (frequently in a two-shot) and Tashi on the other. They are, at this point, the ones with a history, the exact nature of their relationship from preteen boarding school roommates (a quick fact that establishes their privileged backgrounds) to now being something that Tashi appears interested in sussing out. It isn’t until Tashi stands to go sit on the bed, beckoning the boys to join her, that the three appear side-by-side together, Tashi’s positioning in the center an indicator of how she is the sun around which Patrick and Art orbit— and what happens next cluing us in to what a master at shifting the dynamics around them all that she’s about to be.
That isn’t where Challengers, which was penned by Justin Kuritzkes, begins, however. The story opens in the near-present day (2019, as some loose signals from TV and radio bulletins indicate). Art and Tashi are now married, rich, famous, and have a five-year-old daughter; the latter’s career as a player ended after an injury she sustained in college before she ever got to go professional, her best chance at a win now manifesting in her husband, who she has coached to stardom. Art’s game has been slipping, however, so to set the stage for his comeback and help regain his confidence, Tashi signs him up as a last-minute wild card addition at a low stakes challenger tournament at a country club in New Rochelle, New York. What neither of them count on, however, is that Patrick is one of the competitors. His present circumstances are about as far removed from Art and Tashi as imaginable. Unlike those two, he skipped college to go straight into playing professionally, but never quite managed to make it; he’s so down-on-his-luck when we meet him that he can’t even check into a crappy motel in New Rochelle because his credit card is repeatedly declined. He picks up local women on Tinder just to have a place to sleep that isn’t his car. Art may need this match to prove something to himself, and to Tashi, but Patrick actually needs it for the money— and to have a chance at moving up.
The film’s compelling nesting structure jumps back-and-forth between this climatic match between Art and Patrick in the present, the couple of weeks and days leading up to it, and 13 years ago, when they all first met. This way, layers of the past are constantly revealed that inform the present, namely the fact that Patrick and Tashi were an item long before she and Art were, a connection that never fully dissipated despite the anger she outwardly expresses toward him. And yet, there’s some crucial connective tissue missing in the character work. Patrick is more a cypher than the other two, more a chaotic wrench thrown into Art and Tashi’s lives as they repeatedly collide over the years than a human with clear desires beyond what he needs in the current moment, but O’Connor portrays him with a similarly compelling sort of raffish directionlessness and easy charm that he employed most recently in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. For Art and Tashi, things are messier. In the present day, Art doesn’t seem interested in winning, doesn’t really even seem interested in playing tennis anymore. He’s only doing it for Tashi, who won’t stop pushing him. She’s become increasingly steely over the years, focused only on the win; understandably so, as once her relationship with tennis ended, her relationships with people effectively ended too. We can infer a lot of things in Art’s constant reaching out for her, only to be met by Tashi’s pity and disdain: that over the years we don’t see, he’s become worn down by her relentlessness, and she frustrated by his continually falling short. The towering billboards for an ad campaign they participated in together for Aston Martin, touting the pair as a “Game Changer,” begin to adopt a mocking tone the more they appear throughout the film.
It’s not enough, however. Faist, with his expressive eyes and angled features, is at least able to do a lot with a little, and it’s sobering to watch the love and enthusiasm he exhibits early on curdle into sullenness and despair. But as the narrative’s gravitational pull, Tashi needs to possess more of an interior life than what we see here. It’s partly a fault of the writing, and partly the performance. When she’s playing younger, pre-injury Tashi, Zendaya is all full-wattage movie star charm (of which off-screen, she is arguably at the height of, from her appearance in such massive movies as Dune: Part Two to her producer credit on Challengers to her red carpet looks that are almost as widely talked about as her film roles). It’s evident in her almost feral movements on the court, and her confidence and charisma off. When Art and Patrick first glimpse her at that party, they watch slack-jawed as she moves on the dance floor, her body loose and carefree. We completely understand why they are so transfixed by this woman they’ve never even spoken to, because we are too. It’s when she’s playing older, present-day Tashi that the performance starts to crumble. There are gestures toward a warmer, softer side when it comes to her daughter (amongst the delicate jewelry she wears is a handmade beaded bracelet that spells out her daughter’s name, Lily), but motherhood doesn’t otherwise appear to inform her character. Neither does race, despite a throwaway line about how she’s “taking such good care” of her “little white boys.” She otherwise plays Tashi with an icy coolness that ought to belie the red-hot emotions that are surely roiling inside her, but it rarely seems like she is reaching for feelings that emanate from somewhere deeper than surface level. She’s just cold. As much as Challengers seems to be positioning itself as a huge, mature movie star role for her, the ball falls a short of clearing the net.
It doesn’t really do the film many favors either than the story’s most intriguing relationship by far is the one that we see the least of, and that’s Art and Patrick. The narrative, like Tashi, likes to prod at just how significant they are to each other, and their scenes together crackle with intimacy and the prospect of what could have been and what might be. Even when they are explicitly playing for Tashi— for her number, for her affection— there’s a sense that they’re merely channeling desire for each other through her (this is another failing of Tashi’s character: positioning her as a powerful, independent woman when in reality she’s just an object for the men to fight over). After all, if tennis is a relationship, it’s one between the people batting their balls at each other (pun intended), not the one who is sitting in the middle, watching them go at it. While that first hotel room ménage à trois is the one that visually most closely resembles a tennis match, specifically the New Rochelle match that serves as the film’s framing device, it’s telling how the rest of Challengers’ almost-sex scenes are so un-erotic compared to how Guadagnino shoots the tennis matches. We never witness any of the couples ever graduate beyond foreplay in the bedroom; long before anyone can achieve climax, the encounter crumbles. Tashi can’t stop talking about tennis, critiquing Patrick’s game even as she sits astride him. A make-out session between Tashi and Art outside an Applebee’s is interrupted by an employee noisily emptying the garbage (a prophetic sign of things to come if there ever was one). Years later, an effort at intimacy between Tashi and Art the evening before the New Rochelle game falls apart in quiet tears and frustrated glances. Most of these scenes are long shots, holding the viewer at a physical distance that mirrors the characters’ emotional distance.
But it’s in that match between Art and Patrick, particularly in its thrilling final stretch, that the film finally explodes in orgasmic pleasure. Guadagnino’s fascination with the body that is such a key component of his work, from the twisted body of horror of his 2018 Suspiria remake and 2022’s cannibal love story Bones and All to the exploratory summer romance of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, truly manifests itself here with close-ups that linger on the body: the twitch of muscles, skin drenched in sweat. And while the film is visually interesting throughout, with invigorating camera moves and dramatic settings (most notably a turbulent windstorm during which Patrick and Tashi have a fraught reunion, which is perhaps a little too on the nose but still crafts a neat atmosphere) enhanced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsing electronic score (which admittedly sometimes overpowers the scene, but on my now fifth consecutive listen-through of the evening it’s impossible to downplay the appeal of wall-to-wall bops), Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who frequently works with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and previously collaborated with Guadagnino on Call Me By Your Name) really go nuts with this final match. It makes a recent interview he did with Little White Lies and what he had to say about tennis make all the more sense: “I mean, is there anything visually interesting about that? Hey, I’m going to say something that I shouldn’t say, but I’m not a great tennis watcher. I don’t watch tennis matches. It’s quite boring to me.” There’s nothing boring or visually uninteresting about the way Guadagnino shoots tennis, however, the camera moving back and forth and over and under the players with a soaring intensity, and in one particularly exhilarating moment even becoming the tennis ball. It’s a lot of style that makes it easier to forgive a movie that isn’t propped up by much beyond its aesthetics. But for all the paths its jagged relationships never venture down, for all that they could have and should have been messier, it’s hard to deny the appeal of a young and charismatic cast, an entertaining and sexy premise, and the catharsis of that final clinch. If that’s what tennis is about, I’ll gladly pick up a racket.
Challengers opens in theaters on April 26. Runtime: 131 minutes. Rated R.
Katie at the Movies 