There's a shot during the centerpiece threesome scene in Challengers — the one that's been promoted in all the trailers — of young tennis star Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) looking on with devious glee as her fellow tennis player suitors Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) engage in carnal conduct for her pleasure. Her confident, casual manipulation during that scene suggests a more twisted psychosexual drama that Challengers never delivers, instead settling for a fairly pedestrian sports movie presented in a distractingly garish style.
Told in a nonlinear format across 13 years, Challengers is anchored by a match between Patrick and Art in the later part of their professional tennis careers, as both are struggling to hold onto past glories. Patrick has almost completely washed out, reduced to living in his car and traveling to small regional tournaments in the hope of picking up a bit of prize money. Art is still a top-ranked player, but after winning multiple major championships, he's lost his competitive edge, and his trainer has entered him in one of those small regional tournaments so that he can rebuild his confidence.
That trainer happens to be Tashi, whose own career was cut short after a devastating injury. Her relationship with Art is both personal and professional, but that doesn't mean she doesn't still harbor feelings for Patrick. The emotions between Patrick and Art are even more complex, and they work through those over the course of their inevitable showdown in the tournament finals. Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes shift back and forth between the increasingly grueling match and the events leading up to it, sometimes doubling back to just a few hours before a particular scene.
The result is a lot of distracting obfuscation for such a mundane combination of sports and romance, albeit with a lot more homoeroticism than, say, a movie by Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump). There's also a lot less humor than a Ron Shelton movie, and Guadagnino's heavy-handed approach to the lightweight material is more laughable than engaging. Guadagnino's intense, grandiose filmmaking style has served him well in bizarre genre films like Suspiria and Bones and All, but it comes off as self-indulgent and excessive in relationship dramas like I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. Challengers aims for the all-consuming passion of Guadagnino's most acclaimed film, Call Me by Your Name, but ends up only with sour bickering and empty titillation.
Rather than enhancing the sexual tension between Patrick and Art, that wink-and-nudge vulgarity comes off as an irritating tease, with multiple scenes of the characters greedily consuming phallic food items (churros, bananas) like something out of an Austin Powers movie. O'Connor was more alluring in the underrated 2021 period drama Mothering Sunday, a much better film about sensuality, longing and the fluid nature of memory.
Zendaya makes Tashi into a compelling figure who's both ruthless and vulnerable, torn between her fierce competitive drive and her compassion for Art — and torn further by her strong feelings for both Art and Patrick. But those strong feelings are less convincing given that both men come across like sweaty Muppets in both their interactions with Tashi and with each other.
The constant time shifts in Challengers are as exhausting as Guadagnino's hyperactive visual style. He places the camera in various unlikely places during the many tennis scenes, bombarding the viewer with chaotic but vacant imagery. The pulsating synth score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is the best thing about Challengers, which reaches for primal emotions but only manages the superficial gloss of a flashy music video. ♦
Challengers
