‘Challengers’ Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Grand Slam
Zendaya gives the best performance of her career in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Challengers’, an electrifying sports drama with dazzling bravura tennis sequences that beg the trip to the IMAX theater.
Those who have witnessed intense tennis matches in their lifetimes know how powerful the energy gets on the court, particularly when the athletes are giving their 110% in front of the audience. I remember the day I witnessed Bianca Andreescu defeat Serena Williams at the U.S. Open, which remains the most dazzling, electrifying tennis match I’ve ever seen – one legend going against an up-and-comer who was slowly rising as a potential star in the game, acting as the passing of the torch from one generation to the next.
Tennis matches like these are always exciting (Carlos Alcaraz defeating Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon is another great, and recent, one) because the audience is forced to watch high-stakes displays of energy and emotion as they grunt, sweat, run, and hit the ball with intense, almost overwhelming precision. Sometimes, they’ll smash a racket or two because they’re not in the flow (or the pressure of winning completely shrouds their emotions), showcasing how psychological the game is for them (and for us, as we attach ourselves to one particular player).
In Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, the tennis game between Tashi Donaldson (née Duncan) (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) is all psychological (and sexual). Art and Patrick used to be highly successful tennis partners until their desire for Tashi corrupted their friendship. After a massive injury to the knee, Tashi marries Art and never speaks to Patrick again after he wasn’t there for her during the match that ended her career.
Thirteen years pass, and Art has become more successful than Patrick, with Tashi acting as his coach. But he’s been on a losing streak for some time and needs to regain his groove before qualifying for the U.S. Open. Tashi registers him into a Challengers tournament, hoping it’ll give him the confidence boost he needs before the real matches begin. However, Patrick is also competing in the tournament, leading to a final matchup between the two that’s drenched in sweat and subtle psychological jabs as the ball is tossed from one set to the next.
The film begins in the final’s first set, as the two playfully throw balls and warm themselves up (cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom creates incredible depth of field by constantly making it feel as if the balls will pop off the screen in a daring display of three-dimensionality, without the glasses), as Guadagnino and editor Marco Costa constantly alternate between the past relationship between Art and Patrick and the current-day sets in the Challengers final.
This fragmented narrative may seem a bit daunting at first, but the visual dynamism exacerbated by Mukdeeprom’s incredible eye, alongside a killer, rhythmically overwhelming score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (their best in years), gives each moving part incredible energy. It always keeps the audience on their toes in trying to figure out exactly how each protagonist got to where they currently are, and why Art and Patrick are deeply connected to Tashi. This back-and-forth is, in and of itself, a tennis game, as one is constantly engaged with each moving piece that acts like a ball swerving around from one end of the field to the next.
But the tennis game Guadagnino has in mind isn’t entirely psychological but is instead way more erotic than anything else. In an era where audiences get triggered by sex scenes in movies, always equating them to pornography, here’s a movie with zero sex scenes (other than a threesome that gets comically stopped just as it’s about to get real) but glistening with absolutely powerful sexual energy throughout the entire thing. Movies don’t have to showcase sex to be ‘sexy,’ and Guadagnino proves just how hot it can get by showcasing a pure liberation of the human body as they undergo incredibly athletic feats of derring-do on the court (while also playfully needle-dropping Nelly’s Hot in Herre during a pivotal scene, hammering home that the movie is, indeed, incredibly hot).
Tashi’s introduction is a great example of how powerful slow-motion can be used to express arousal and desire, as Art and Patrick focus on an impressively flexible physique that constantly adapts itself to win the game. They’re not so concerned with how the game is played out but with how Tashi’s perfectly constructed body plays on the court. It’s also why Guadagnino and Mukdeeprom constantly focus on all body parts (yes, all body parts) when depicting the psychological tennis game between Art/Tashi/Patrick and how the game is played on the court.
Some have ridiculed the film for getting an IMAX release, as it doesn’t seem large in scale enough to warrant such a trip to the largest screens. But once you see the final matchup between Art and Patrick, in which Mukdeeprom brilliantly slows things down to examine the slightest flinch or change in the athletes’ physiology (the drenching sweat beautifully exacerbates the slow-motion on display, a perfect companion to Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver’s farming sequence, where the adoration of the human body’s connection with nature was strikingly realized through Zack Snyder’s signature, painterly use of slow-motion), or when the camera cuts to a first-person viewpoint of the two as they throw balls, it makes perfect sense why the film was chosen in those screens.
But an even more striking choice occurred that literally got me up my seat (it almost never happens at screenings, but this was so magical that it almost felt impossible to witness seated down). As the game reaches its apex, Guadagnino and Mukdeeprom invent a brand-new cinematic language for how tennis should be shown on-screen by directly cutting to the point-of-view of the ball itself.
No filmmaker has ever captured the dazzling kinetics of tennis like this in the history of cinema and sport, and this revolutionary break in style acts as the film’s strongest bravura moment. It’s the cherry on top in Guadagnino’s physiologically erotic study of the torment a tennis game can not only have on human beings but to the objects that keep bouncing around before one (or both) player completely breaks himself (or a racket).
It’s also worth noting that Zendaya gives the best performance of her career, one rife with emotional complexity in ways she couldn’t achieve through working with Denis Villeneuve in the Dune saga. Guadagnino knows her strengths and ensures her voracious, unpredictable energy pops off the screen, while O’Connor and Faist balance out Tashi’s psychological game of tennis with two equally impressive turns (one more subdued, until he begins to lash out in the court, while the other more is more charmed by his insistence to reunite with Art than anything else). This matchup electrifies the screen and will hopefully signal a new era in Zendaya’s career as a legitimate movie star.
With Challengers, Guadagnino delivers his grand slam, one his career has seemingly built towards since he reinvented his filmmaking style with A Bigger Splash. It not only beautifully continues Guadagnino’s study of the liberation of the human body (Bones and All) studied it through the point-of-view of cannibalism), but it also strikingly captures tennis as the sweatiest and sexiest sport there is. You may never look at the sport the same way again come Wimbledon this summer, and that’s a fact.