Review: “Challengers” is a tennis three-way with one hell of a climax

Come for the homoerotic tennis, stay for the sizzling Reznor/Ross score

I would normally resist reducing a film as good as Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers to a pithy one-liner description like “the tennis threesome movie,” but in this case, that’s absolutely what the movie is, and I’m not sure Guadagnino or anyone else involved would debate that. While the film’s nominal subject matter is tennis, it is in actuality a movie about a woman trying to get two male best friends with staggering levels of unresolved sexual tension to finally bang, a Sisyphean task she struggles at for over a decade until, in the movie’s final moments – well, I suppose I shouldn’t spoil things.

Suffice it to say this is a tremendously horny sports-centric melodrama crackling in every instant with sexuality; sometimes it’s smart, sometimes it’s sultry, and sometimes it’s completely adolescent, as in a scene where our two male leads competitively rehearse their obvious desires with suspiciously long churros. In every instance, it is a film about three people for whom tennis is sex and sex is tennis and all of it is laden with desire and power dynamics and messy feelings of domination and/or inadequacy. It isn’t really a spoiler to say the film’s climax (inevitably a double-entendre) is all of these things as well. I found it immensely satisfying, dramaturgically speaking; telling you how satisfied the characters are as the film cuts to credits would, I suppose, be the real spoiler.

Challengers becomes a great movie in its last ten minutes, and up until that point I was worried it might merely be a very good one. It reaches a big thematic punch fairly early in its runtime, in a scene very much in conversation with 21^st-century cinema’s most famous menage-a-trois film, Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también; past that point, I wondered if Challengers had said its piece and become content with being a slick, entertaining sports/sex drama. And that would be fine, because the film is very good at being that. It’s stupendously photographed by the great Sayombhu Mukdeeprom on honest-to-God 35mm – having real, tangible texture is almost incalculably important for a movie this obsessed with bodies and movement and touch – and Guadagnino finds continually more creative ways of shooting tennis all the way through the final set (when they mount the camera to the ball and let the entire frame bounce furiously around the court, even if it’s probably a visual effect, I wanted to stand up and cheer). Justin Kuritzkes’ script volleys dialogue back and forth like a good play, its out-of-chronology storytelling sharp and lively enough to never overplay its hand, and the whole film moves with such a confident stride that I can easily imagine it being the kind of flick you’d catch halfway through on cable and feel compelled to drop everything and follow through to the end (or the modern equivalent, seeing one YouTube clip and going down a recommendations rabbit-hole until you’ve suddenly consumed half the movie in 3-minute chunks). But Challengers really does ratchet up a few notches in its final minutes, pulls the strings taut with a truly outstanding ending that elevates all the good material up to that point. The all-time-great ending I would most compare it to is probably Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, only a bit more explicitly romantic and homoerotic (Whiplash is absolutely a romance, but I’m not sure it’s horny enough to be erotic).

Throughout, the film is driven by three remarkable performances from three outstanding actors: Mike Faist, who was so stupendous as Riff in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story; Josh O’Connor, who arguably imbued Prince Charles with a little too much humanity on the middle seasons of The Crown; and Zendaya, who is – well, she’s Zendaya. She needs no introduction, considering this is her second starring role this year and we’re not even done with April. Challengers is a testament to her star persona especially, not just in terms of on-screen talent, but her eye for good projects and collaborators; she’s also a producer here, and deserves credit for already being able to leverage her star power to get big original movies for adults like this one – a downright endangered species in 2024 Hollywood – not only made, but given a big wide release with plenty of marketing. All three leads are playing their characters at multiple ages over a 13-year stretch, and while everyone avails themselves of that challenge beautifully, Zendaya seems the most comfortable jumping up and down the age ladder, playing a character who is both older and younger than she is in real life and showcasing complete confidence in every period.

But the real star of the show, and the absolute number-one reason to see Challengers, is the outstanding Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score. I already knew it was a banger from listening to the ‘mixed’ soundtrack (created by Boys Noize) several times through since it came out last week; Reznor/Ross scores are some of the only music I can reliably listen to while writing, and even by their standards, this one is a powerhouse. In the film itself, though, Guadagnino doesn’t deploy it the way I was expecting; it often comes in at unexpected moments and in unexpected ways, as forceful and crackling in direct one-on-one dialogue scenes as it is during tennis matches. It’s an electrical current, a simmering fire lit at key moments between characters, an uncanny sonic representation of the sexual energy pulsing through the room. As good (and good-looking) as the actors are, as consumed as Mukdeeprom’s camera is with sweat and muscles and scars and other bodily signs of arousal and attraction – few films are more attuned to the overwhelming and unspoken homoeroticism of competitive sports – the single most charged element of Challengers is the Reznor/Ross score, and that’s true right up until the final scene when we get a full-on banger of an original vocal track to take us into the credits, like the music itself has finally reached climax.

So yes – Challengers is absolutely ‘the tennis threesome movie,’ and it is absolutely great because of it. Here is a real psychosexual drama for adults built around palpable star power and lots of filmmaking panache, the kind Hollywood once had more of a market for – in the broad strokes, at least, if not this film’s actual particulars – but that rarely makes it to theaters these days. Go enjoy it on a big screen with a bombastic sound system, and encourage Hollywood to keep giving weirdos like Luca Guadagnino (I say with love) continuing room to stretch their cinematic legs. I don’t expect tennis three-way dramas to become a genre tab on Letterboxd, but I want more movies like this – smart, fun, soulful character dramas with a sense of style – showing up at the cineplex.

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