‘Challengers’ is the sexiest, most thrilling tennis film

Luca Guadagnino understands heat. The Italian director brought to life the unforgettable sexiness of peaches in his luscious, sun-soaked Call Me By Your Name where he literally made the fruit forbidden, and now he turns his gaze to the competitive battles of tennis, focusing on the hormones that lie between those rackets and returns. His new Challengers (available now for rental on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV) is electrifying and raw, a film where everything is tennis and everything isn’t tennis all at once. You won’t see it coming. (In other words: it’s an ace.)

Challengers is about three young people consumed by tennis—two boys and a girl who plays far better than them—and as we see them rise and fall and stumble and be unspeakably cruel to one another, only one truth pins them in place: they can’t stop playing.

Art Donaldson is good but not great. This lack of sublimity is his cross to bear, and he makes up for it by practising harder and harder, goaded on by a coach who knows better. Patrick Zweig, his best friend and doubles partner, is unquestionably more gifted but also more erratic, less given to discipline. The film begins with Art wanting to win another Grand Slam while Patrick has to sleep in his car. The woman responsible for their trajectories is Tashi Duncan, a preternatural talent who bowls over both boys with her skills and her supreme confidence. She knows the game while they just play it.

Instantly she becomes the object of their affections. She is their Grand Slam—but she’d rather win than be won.

Zendaya, already one of the most thrilling talents of her generation, sets the screen, and the court, afire as Tashi. She echoes the relentlessness of the film’s rhythm as she pushes herself and the boys harder, her eyes speaking volumes even when just observing two men play—be it playing on court or playing the fool. West Side Story star Mike Faist is impeccable as Patrick, full of discipline and doubt, fighting not only opponents but his imposter-complex. The film’s most magnetic performance comes from Josh O’Connor as Patrick. The actor I know as the tentative young Prince Charles on The Crown (Netflix) is a livewire in Challengers, with a scruffy Adam Driver-esque energy and an unpredictably powerful charm. The unruliness of this character is emblematic of the messiness in sport itself. The reason we can’t stop watching.

The music pulses. Scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the background is a frantic electronic heartbeat that instantly evokes their masterpiece, The Social Network. Challengers opening track, for instance, segues perfectly into the familiar beeps of an iPhone alarm. At first, these individual bits seem deceptively commercial: gym-friendly bursts of encouraging EDM that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Nike advert, the sort where Roger Federer and Andre Agassi hold up traffic in order to play. However, where that is just 30 seconds of pre-logo punch-punch-punch, keeping up such a breathless rhythm for a feature-length tennis match turns it into something else. In a five-setter, anything can happen and everything is to play for. The beat makes sure the conversations, the sex, the sheer unadulterated wanting and longing… are all keeping score.

This tempo is pushed harder by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom—of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Call Me By Your Name—who shoots tennis matches like never before, with unreal top-shots and close-ups of torsos and gorgeous slow-motion shots taken from under the tennis court as if a gopher had x-ray vision, but also shoots everything else as if it were tennis. Two boys bite into churros and toss out passive-aggressive remarks, but under Mukdeeprom’s lens this may as well be the French Open final.

As a love triangle, the film is devastating and savage, with the three players turning increasingly antagonistic, and frequently often hateful. Guadagnino’s style, however—thanks to the music and visual flourishes—is that of constant breathlessness. Challengers is an astonishingly sexy film, and when it isn’t spitting on someone before making out with them, it’s edging.

I can’t stop thinking about Zendaya’s character. The film is somewhat sympathetic toward the boys, but Tashi is mercilessly consumed by the sport. The baseline is the bottom line, and everything—her marriage, her mental health, her self-worth—takes second place to the scoreboard. The other two fling themselves into love and rivalry and sport fiercely, like competitors, but they are driven by their desire for the prize while she is singularly about the game. She is all tennis. To her, Love means nothing.