CHALLENGERS– 4 STARS

It’s difficult to name a sport that puts a live microscope on its competitors more than in tennis featured in Luca Guadagnino’s hotly anticipated Challengers. Sure, all eyes are on individual gymnasts and figure skaters, yet their routines are over in mere minutes compared to the grueling 90-120 minutes of a tennis match. Pitchers and batters in baseball have one-on-one dynamics with pauses and anticipation similar to tennis, but their encounters are also over in minutes or seconds. Moreover, any verbal banter or body language is masked by crowd noise, stadium music, and the proxy armor of a hat or helmet.  

LESSON #1: HAVING ONE’S COMPOSURE ON FULL DISPLAY AT ALL TIMES– In tennis, the two athletes involved are on full display. Their thin fashions may have light functionality for the kinetic movement of sport, while also becoming a source of physical judgment bordering on body-shaming. The decorum is one of the strictest. Tennis players perform before a crowd ordered to be silent, where every tick, grunt, and outburst can be seen or heard by all in attendance with penalties for inappropriateness.

Challengers roars forth to use the invasive scrutiny found in tennis as a mimicking reflection of personal hostilities and exposed intimacies. Keeping with that idea of body language, Guadagnino’s blistering athletic love triangle is a ballet of sweat and a battle of three beautifully furrowed brows set atop the lithe bodies of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist. For two hours-plus mirroring the length of a full set tennis match, this film cuts years deep and rips off scabs to show you why those brows are furrowed and towards whom.

At the present setting of Challengers, champion professional tennis player Art Donaldson (West Side Story breakout Mike Faist) is on a cold streak and contemplating retirement before or after one more good run at completing his career Grand Slam. His determined wife and merciless coach is Tashi Duncan (the multi-talented crossover icon Zendaya), a former juniors champion whose future was derailed by a catastrophic knee injury a dozen years ago. As a way of getting her man back in the saddle by smashing lesser competition, Tashi enters Art in Phil’s Tire Town Challenger in New Rochelle, New Jersey, a qualifying event that is normally beneath a player of his stature. 

All’s well and good until the tournament final pits Art against his former junior doubles partner Patrick Zweig (The Crown Emmy winner Josh O’Connor). Where Art lives in the lap of luxury with high-end endorsement deals and an entire regiment of nutrition and physical therapy to perform with the best in the world, Patrick enters New Rochelle with a maxed out credit card and sleeps in his beater car. Nevertheless, we ascertain very quickly that these two (make that three when you include Tashi) have as-yet-undisclosed history. 

The facial expressions start the guessing game. Beginning with those furrowed brows of targeted focus, the rigor of the match and the underlying anxieties shift those looks to ones of discontent. The occasional cocky smirk of coverup is peppered in and meant to throw the other off their game as the match between Al and Patrick begins. All three primary stars seize their scenes and your gaze as an audience to the point you’re dying to know more about what makes each of them tick or the next moment where some proverbial shoe drops. 

LESSON #2: HAVING SOMEONE’S NUMBER– I love the variations of the idiomatic expression “I’ve got your number” when it comes to matters of competition. The dichotomy between advantages and disadvantages in the areas of confidence and outcomes through those who own or manipulate this label is fascinating. The script from playwright and first-time feature writer Justin Kuritzkes (husband to award-winning Past Lives revelation Celine Song) may not use this idiom explicitly, but Challengers dangles this type of gamesmanship and needs a bigger scoreboard to keep track of all the psychological numbers being bandied about and rung up.

LESSON #3: IF YOU THINK YOUR ROMANTIC PAST IS COMPLICATED, JUST YOU WAIT– Kuritzkes’ plotline for Challengers caroms back and forth over a dozen years offering timestamped episodic milestones of this trio’s past, from their first lustful meeting as teens to their peaks and valleys as aspiring professionals and romantic partners. Each petal of Challengers’ thistled artichoke reveals the unearthed secrets of how this fateful triangle started, flourished, and eventually split and failed, only to be thrust together again at this current tiebreaker-length showdown with critical consequences for both Patrick and Al. The less you know ahead of time about all of this history, the better. 

Needless to say, there are shocking winners and losers to be adjudicated on and off the court with this murky triangular prism of lovestruck personalities. Zendaya simply owns this movie, and it’s not solely because she’s a bankrolling producer and her visage fills the attention-getting poster. No morsel or muscle of this movie’s mystery and intensity can dodge her involvement and magnetic presence. No one wins without her winning, and her two friends-turned-suitors of Faist and O’Connor are evenly cut into twisted halves of her dominance. 

If the thorny and sexy entanglements of our main characters’ skeleton-filled closets isn’t captivating enough (which is wildly is) especially when divulged squirts at a time from Kuritzke’s flashback structure and the outstanding editing of Marco Costa (Bones and All), Luca Guadagnino heaps on even more edgy style to make the sport of tennis look sharper and more vibrant than it ever has on the big screen. Thirteen Lives cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom lifts, bends, and whips the camera into stellar angles and positions to zing those smashed chartreuse rubber spheres (or their CGI alternatives) right across our seated noses and foreheads. The number of inventive shots to enhance the simple back-and-forth of the game is extraordinary.  

Another impressive facet of Challengers is its energetic and menacing sense of riskiness. Slopes don’t get more slippery than this, surely causing more than a few dropped jaws and clutched armrests. All of the mind games and their athletic equivalents are catapulted by a propulsive electronic score for Academy Award winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network). The duo’s flashy beats are some of the best of their movie careers. Their transitional cues are nothing short of adrenaline injections that work hard to eliminate any lulls and perk up the sleazy underbelly of the gentlemanly sports setting.

If there is an equivalent to a cinematic tennis code violation in Challengers it comes in the final act. The theatrical knots that increase ties and connect backstories get more complex and regrettably more lurid as they are unveiled. Combine that extra muck dragging with an overindulgent increase of slow-motion action photography from Mukdeeprom and Guadagnino and patience and rationality for the earned victories and comeuppances can be tested. While no one is going to shatter a racket on the ground in frustration for getting more melodrama to play with, there’s about three twists too many, even if you’re hanging for every one of them.