Challengers (M18)

132 minutes, opens on May 1
4 stars

The story: Former tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) is a wife and mother who manages her husband Art (Mike Faist), a tennis professional. His career is in a slump, so she books him to play in a smaller competition, hoping an easy win will restore his flagging confidence. Playing in the same tournament is Patrick (Josh O’Connor), Art’s former best friend and doubles partner. He is also Tashi’s former boyfriend.

A recent article in The New York Times says this film is part of a trend indicating that cinema is no longer afraid to embrace erotic themes. 

Let’s not get carried away. Sexual tension of the kind shown in Challengers never went away. The difference is that the studio made a strategic bet on using titillation as a marketing tool, judging by the images accompanying the film’s release. 

Titillation in cinema is fine, but those expecting this picture to be as explicit as, say, fantasy series Game Of Thrones (2011 to 2019) will have to look elsewhere.

Challengers is a sexy film, but the sex lives mostly in the looks of yearning and heated dialogue. The skin on display is for those who enjoy looking at fit, athletic male bodies. 

Director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, 2015; Bones And All, 2022) loves to tease.

He has fun playing with audience expectations about when and where the dam of inhibition will burst. He takes his time creating the circumstances that will cause repressed desires to emerge, dramatically.

Emotions are messy, and he is not afraid to get messy in depicting them – he famously made peaches a meme following the release of his coming-of-age movie Call Me By Your Name (2017).

In the story of Tashi, Art and Patrick, tennis is treated as an extended metaphor for the three-cornered tussle for sexual dominance.

In a non-linear fashion, groundwork is laid for the match-up between the two men, one that will bring to a climax years of simmering resentment, thwarted ambition and something else entirely.

Guadagnino makes the tennis feel sweatily real. This is not a story that uses the sport as window dressing. The matches are intense action scenes and the outcomes have consequences. 

This is Zendaya’s movie. Her character is at its centre, existing as both the object of male rivalry and something of an enigmatic femme fatale.

Is she a scheming puppetmaster or a victim dealing with the fallout from her husband’s tennis impotency? Perhaps she is both. That ambiguity, coolly delivered by a gifted actress, makes the interplay all the more intriguing.  

Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, making his feature film debut, has delivered a sports movie with a twist of sexual jealousy. It does not always work – young Tashi is inexplicably wise beyond her years and the non-linear storytelling can be confusing. 

These flaws are easily forgiven. In Guadagnino’s hands, the three leads are just too compulsively watchable.

Hot take: The director of stylish stories about forbidden desires delivers another compelling drama about attractive people with messy passions.