Zendaya’s Instant-Classic New Tennis Movie Will Make You Sweat As Much As Its Stars

The tennis match that begins, ends, and provides the central narrative framework for Challengers, the vibrant new film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, Suspiria) at first strikes the viewer as implausibly high-stakes for a match at a shabby New Rochelle, New York, tournament called the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger. Two fiercely competitive male players, filmed in close-ups so tight that the beads of sweat flying off their faces seem to be the size of marbles, slam the ball back and forth as if vying for world-champion status, while a rapt crowd watches with the side-to-side head swivels that make audiences at tennis tournaments appear to be under hypnosis. (Over the course of the movie to come, Guadagnino will slyly play that swiveling motion for both suspense and laughs.) In the midst of the crowd sits a chic young woman who looks especially engaged with the volley in progress. She locks in on the motion of the ball in play as if its every thwack could decide her fate—which, as the rest of Challengers will show via a series of intricately nested flashbacks, is pretty much the case, thanks to decisions she and the men on the tennis court have made over 13 shared years of friendship, enemy-ship, and love.

The woman in the stands, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), is a former tennis prodigy forced into retirement by an injury during a college match. She now serves as both coach and manager to her husband, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a star player currently struggling to emerge from a midcareer slump. The other man on the court, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), is Art’s estranged best friend since childhood, a brilliant but undisciplined player who has spent the past decade on the fringes of the pro tennis world, getting by winning small tournaments against far less talented opponents. When we first meet them, Tashi and Art are a world-famous power couple, their photogenic faces gazing sleekly down from giant billboards promoting Art’s corporate sponsors. Meanwhile, Patrick is so down on his luck he has to sleep in his car in the tournament parking lot and sweet-talk the lady who signs him in to share half of her breakfast bagel.

But a long sequence set 13 years in the past makes clear that the power relations among these three have not always been so simple. When they first met Tashi, teenage tennis stars Patrick and Art watched in slack-jawed, horny awe as the then-unbeatable phenom destroyed an opponent on her way to winning a youth tournament. In Patrick’s words, Tashi is “the hottest woman alive,” as desirable for her prowess on the court as for her long limbs and frank come-hither stare. At a lavish party thrown by her sponsor to celebrate Tashi’s victory, the two young men—boys, at that point—vie for her attention and her phone number. After a teasing make-out session that seems to dangle the possibility of a future threesome, Tashi declares she will bestow the longed-for digits on whichever of them wins the next day’s match. The seed of jealousy this promise plants in Art and Patrick’s hitherto puppylike friendship will grow, over the next decade-plus, into the defining rivalry of all three of their lives, on the court and off.

Challengers’ temporal structure is complex but, thanks to Marco Costa’s snappy editing, never hard to follow. Each successive flashback brings us one plot twist closer to understanding the stakes of the present-day match, the overlapping time frames shuffling together like cards in a deck. The screenplay—by the playwright Justin Kuritzkes, writing his first feature—establishes early on that the bond among all three protagonists passes first through tennis and only secondarily through physical intimacy. When Patrick becomes Tashi’s boyfriend during her college years, it’s clear that what binds them together is their shared killer instinct on the court. Later, after Tashi’s injury sidelines her from the sport she once seemed destined to dominate, she pours all her tennis know-how into molding the less instinct-driven but harder-working Art into a world-class player. The contrast between technical discipline and sheer animal drive, and the need to master both these forces before one can achieve greatness, becomes the movie’s most insistent theme.

The luscious cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who also shot Call Me by Your Name) plays up the central trio’s sensuality and athleticism. Though the sex scenes are not especially graphic, there is male nudity aplenty as Patrick, Art, and their fellow players wander in and out of sauna rooms, seldom bothering with towels. Tennis matches are filmed using inventive techniques, from POV ball-cam to a glass-bottom boat effect that has the viewer observing a game in progress from underneath, as if the floor of the court were transparent. Every once in a while, the movie’s devotion to framing its three charismatic stars in the most flattering possible light tips over into music-video territory, as when a close-up of Zendaya in a rainstorm lingers a fraction too long over her slo-mo windblown locks. But like Call Me by Your Name before it, Challengers is upfront in its desire to furnish the viewer with beautiful bodies and faces to look at. It doesn’t hurt that Zendaya, Faist (who broke out as Riff in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story), and O’Connor (who played Prince Charles on The Crown) are each a piece of eye candy of a different flavor: Zendaya sleek and imperturbable, Faist elegant and dancerlike, O’Connor a scruffy charmer whose devilish grin recalls a young Nicolas Cage. Thanks to ingenious costuming and styling, these three excellent actors, respectively 27 (Zendaya), 32 (Faist), and 33 (O’Connor), all carry off the trick of seeming to age from recent high school graduates to adults in their early 30s.

As to whether the circuit of desire at work among this threesome is straight, gay, or bisexual in nature, Guadagnino seems serenely uninterested in nailing down an answer. The men’s blood feud has as much to do with their mutual attraction as with the woman they’ve both spent their adult lives pursuing and trying to impress. Yet this isn’t the story of two closeted gay men arriving at their long-repressed sexual truth. Early in the film, during that first teenage make-out session, Tashi engineers a kiss between the two boys, sitting back with a Cheshire-cat smile as she sets them down an erotic path they’ve never fully explored. In a different movie, they might discover each other and forget about her. But the three-way relationship Challengers wants to explore is more circuitous, and kinkier, than that. In order for their athletic and romantic lives to function, Patrick, Art, and Tashi feel a less-than-healthy need to channel their lust for each other into their drive to win at tennis—and at times, with disastrous consequences, vice versa. “I’d let her fuck me with a tennis racket,” mutters horndog Patrick when he sees Tashi on the court for the first time. In some ways, he doesn’t know just how prophetic that image will turn out to be, not just for himself but for all three of them.

Guadagnino’s weaving of eroticism into the everyday physicality of high-level athletic training brings to mind earlier cinematic depictions of the way romance and sports can combine, films like Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2000 directorial debut Love and Basketball, Ron Shelton’s 1988 love-triangle baseball classic Bull Durham, or the 1982 Robert Towne drama Personal Best, a lesbian love story set in the world of track and field. Challengers may not be this director’s most psychologically insightful movie—the characters can at times feel like chess-piece contrivances rather than fully rounded individuals—but it’s almost certainly his most entertaining and fastest-paced. The thumping EDM score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross lends not only the tennis scenes but several moments of off-court intimacy an atmosphere of pulse-pounding immediacy. And even if, like me, you’re not a sports person, either at the movies or in real life, the stakes of the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger have been so firmly established by the movie’s final scene that, like Zendaya’s Tashi, you’ll find your head swiveling from side to side as if your life’s trajectory hangs on the next bounce of that neon-green ball.