Challengers: Luca Guadagnino summons the potent yearning of his finest work with a hot and heavy tennis drama

Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s latest, runs a reliable play: there’s a love triangle that’s gleefully unsubtle about the sexual tensions between its rival suitors; then there’s a match – a sweaty, audibly suggestive, ball-busting match – which extends throughout the length of the film, its stakes growing as we plunge into the backgrounds of its players. This frisky formula captivates, but it also gives the Italian director, known for his extravagant style, parameters with which to focus his ideas about sex and eroticism. 

Guadagnino’s two most recent films – Suspiria (2018), a turgid remake of the giallo classic, and Bones and All (2022), a teen-cannibal romance with lacklustre bids at soulfulness – disappointed because they felt bloated, sloppy, full of big swings that registered like shots in the dark. Now, confined to the dimensions of the court and the struggles of a magnetic menage à trois, Guadagnino has returned to form, summoning the potent yearnings of his finest work, Call Me by Your Name (2017), and placing them in a major key. Challengers is a hot and heavy drama, but full of breezy wit and bizarre, borderline uncanny touches that, if they don’t always work, at least keep you on your toes, entertained. 

The film opens on the match. On one side, there’s Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a tennis star flush with endorsement deals but suffering from a lousy season; on the other, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), a puckish minor-league player. Smack-dab between them, watching from the front row, is Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art’s wife and coach, looking unusually disturbed as Patrick, the underdog, takes the lead in the first set. Mirroring the ricocheting of the ball, narrative zips back and forth between the ongoing match and extended flashbacks which create a history of the trio’s 15-year relationship. Tashi, whom the boys first meet when they’re high-school besties and doubles partners, is a teenage tennis prodigy on her way to becoming the next Serena Williams – a dream cut short by a knee injury. 

Nevertheless, it’s Tashi’s drive and hunger that motors the plot well beyond her individual career. I’ve never been particularly impressed by Zendaya as a performer until now – but here there’s a confidence in her eyes that makes her a natural puppetmaster; lanky and youthful, she gives off an almost cosmic form of endurance. When we see Tashi play tennis, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom depicts her as an exceptional force; unlike Patrick and Art when they play, the camera looks at Tashi head-on, using an intimidatingly direct frontal shot that emphasises the concentration in her gaze, the power in each one of her strikes. This force of will serves as a kind of aphrodisiac. The night they first meet, Tashi’s coy smile, and a few waves of her hand, instigate a hotel-room make-out session in which the guys briefly act on their mutual attraction. Patrick and Art compete for her affections, on court and off, and eventually fall out. 

Tashi’s ferocity makes her sexually compatible with Patrick, a rogue presence who runs hot, but mixing fire with fire spells ruin for their short-lived relationship; she eventually hooks up with the more even-tempered Art, shaping him into an athletic sensation. Tennis, in case it wasn’t obvious, represents desire, and it’s in this erotic vacuum that Guadagnino, with a nimble script written by Justin Kuritzkes, unleashes the film’s games, a hodgepodge of backstabbing, cuckolding, smack talking, and scheming that maintains the charged momentum of the match itself, the film’s framing device. 

There are quieter moments of delicacy and tenderness, usually courtesy of Art, whom Faist gives a palpable vulnerability. But when the score hits, with bracing electronic tracks by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, we’re thrown back into a game mode that is simultaneously dead serious and playfully conscious of its own ridiculousness. This ethos bathes every charged encounter between factions, be it Art spotting Tashi and Patrick canoodling in the corner of a lobby; or Art and Patrick, hardly covered with towels, playing mind games in a sauna. 

Several moments, especially as the match heads into its dizzying final set, seem to break with reality: a windstorm intensifies as Tashi argues violently with Patrick to the point of arousal; and in the final minutes of the match, the tension breaks into a frenzied, orgasmic first-person shot from the perspective of the tennis ball. This is the absurd but fundamentally human character of competitive sports, in which one must bend backwards, suspend reason, to win what is ultimately a fleeting objective. The same might be said of good sex. 

 ► Challengers is in UK cinemas from 26 April.