Review of Challengers: Zendaya stands up to the anticipation by delving deeply into the mind of a woman who will not accept no, in addition to portraying an enticing seductress with compelling elegance
Tashi Duncan, a champion whose career was cut short by injury, argues that tennis is more than just hitting a ball with a racket. Duncan is played by Zendaya. She implies that it is a romance. She fails to mention something that Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers does: sports have a way of changing, if not very subtly, with the ups and downs of form, confidence, and the guts to take a risk.
Tennis in Luca Guadignino’s Challengers is about human equations and mind games, as it typically is in life. In the lives of three persons involved in a chaotic menage à trois where the ball is hit from one court to the other and back without permission, it acts as both glue and repulsion. Instead of using overt titillation techniques, it produces an intriguing, sensual, and thrilling film.
To some extent, Guadagnino’s self-described “desire” trilogy—I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me by Your Name—may be extended in Challengers. The goal of this seductive and captivating sports movie isn’t just to build a rivalry between tennis players to a climax and then offer a serve-and-volley match that results in a variety of thrilling cross-court winners.
It does almost everything perfectly, yet nothing in Challengers can match its brilliantly thought-out and suspenseful conclusion. It is supported with a hardcore techno score by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who collaborated with Guadagnino on 2022’s Bones and All. It is enlightening with a brilliant burst of inspiration that matters for far more than a point gained in the game. It’s on a whole other level.
A tale of wavering love, ambition, ego, and obsession lies at the heart of the captivating drama around broken relationships. Self-interest and hatred propels three tennis prodigies onto dangerous terrain, where their lives have intersected yet produced different outcomes.
Three of them—one a three-time NCAA champion—had to give up tennis before she turned eighteen, another advanced to the pinnacle of the sport, and the third, having fallen short of his own expectations, has been reduced to oblivion. They are linked to one another irrevocably.
Challengers takes place in the 2019 ATP Tour tournament championship match. At the end, it features the final match between old boarding school roommates Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), with the former’s life partner and tennis coach Tashi watching as a spectator and a deeply involved spectator.
A losing streak is preventing tennis star Art Donaldson from completing a career Grand Slam in the lead-up to the US Open. Tashi advises him to sign up for a low-risk challenger at the New Rochelle Tennis Club, which is located outside of New York, in order to resume winning before the Big One, which has escaped him.
When Tashi finds out that Patrick—a man she and Art had eliminated from their lives over ten years ago—is also in the lineup, everything seems certain to go south. Patrick has no money. He can’t check into a hotel because of an issue with his credit card. He naps in his vehicle. When he paired with Art in college activities, his life and profession obviously haven’t brought him to where he would have loved to be.
With the use of flashbacks that trace the development of their friendship and relationships tainted by dishonesty and dubious behavior, the tale of tennis players who have known one another personally for more than ten years is stitched together. The three are too preoccupied with themselves to be seeking sympathy. That represents the film’s greatest obstacle. Tashi, Art, and Patrick are undoubtedly not considerate of manners because they will stop at nothing to get what they desire.
The viewer must determine how exactly to relate to the trio on their own. Which way do we want our feelings toward them to go? Should we support them or hate what they say, do, and say to themselves and each other? Challengers are at the losing end in the ambiguity game.
The screenplay by playwright Justin Kuritzkes is so rife with moral and emotional ambiguities that it is impossible to sympathize with the friends-turned-enemies Patrick and Art or the unwavering Tashi, who is determined to assist Art get out of his current situation. Her task ahead of her is formidable. She’ll stop at nothing to ensure she’s not left wanting.
With tennis at its core, Challengers is a chic, deftly constructed psychodrama that smacks the ball out of the park thanks to three incredibly self-aware central performances. O’Connor performs with incredible flare as a complete twerp. He annoys, he provokes, and he doesn’t back down from his arrogant behavior. The actor makes clicks with each step.
With equal conviction, Faist develops Art Donaldson, a man who is more manipulative than manipulative. There are many highs in the duet that the two performers perform. Their on-court and off-court jousting gives the movie its mesmerizing atmosphere.
But when all is said and done, Zendaya is the essence of Challengers. Patrick calls her character “the hottest woman I have ever seen” at one point. In addition to playing an enticing seductress with fascinating elegance, Zendaya lives up to the anticipation by delving deeply into the thoughts of a woman who will not accept no.
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a renowned cinematographer whose credits include the Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Call Me by Your Name, contributes his established sense of texture and depth to the visuals, as well as his skill at using the camera to simulate the distanced and detached view of a world full of contradictions.
Challengers’s fractured timeline, which depicts encounters and exchanges that are both youthfully passionate and instantly traumatic, adds to the film’s allure. It shows how the dynamics of the story shift between a tense love triangle and a story in which a wedge the size of a tennis court is driven between former tennis partners. These dribbles are both enlightening and captivating.
The film Challengers is incredibly well-crafted. It is both palpable and vivid.
Cast:
Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
