Grade: A-
I want to adequately prepare you for Challengers. It will, excuse me, challenge the audience. Watching it was like sitting on pins and needles. Every moment is cranked up to a fever pitch. The dialogue contains some of the most toxic, hurtful lines I’ve heard in a film. It is unrelentingly intense. I wondered if certain characters had a soul. I want to see it again, but not right away. I need to wind down and come back to it, rested. You might leave the movie feeling more high-strung and tightly drawn than when you went in. And another thing? I can’t deny how affected I was.
There might not be a director working today who can create sexual tension onscreen better than Luca Guadagnino. The director of Bones and All, Suspiria, and Call Me by Your Name brings the high-strung sexual energy to Challengers in full force. The sound designers make their presence known. Every racket hitting a ball announces itself with a loud bonk, sometimes rivaling the worst jump scare in a horror film. Ear-splitting pulsing music, like you’d hear in a club, underscores all the many verbal battles of wits. This is the most out there movie of the year – in your face and in your ears.
It’s a tennis movie with one of the most hardcore, complicated, emotionally invested love triangles I’ve ever seen. The film volleys back and forth through time, many many times. We get title cards galore: “thirteen years earlier,” “two years later,” “three days earlier,” “five years later,” “the next day,” etc, but to its credit, I was only confused once. It spans a total of 13 years, from 2006 to 2019. That’s ages 18 to 31 for our three main players. Zendaya, Mike Faist (a show-stealing Riff from Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story), and Josh O’Connor (The Crown) convincingly play young, older, and in between.
Even though the movie doesn’t, I’ll start in 2006. Faist and O’Connor play Art and Patrick, lifelong best friends and tennis buddies. They are a team, playing doubles. When watching another game in the tournament, they set their sights on Tashi (Zendaya), a hell of a player. They meet at a party, and after some persuasive talking, the three of them have an interesting night in the guys’ hotel room.
Challengers actually begins in 2019. Tashi and Art are married with a young daughter. (In a fun in-joke, the daughter asks her mother, Zendaya: “Mommy, can I watch Spider-Verse?”) We don’t see much of the girl, much less a semblance of a relationship with her parents. She spends most of her time pawned off to Tashi’s mother. I was going to criticize this as a mistake or a lack of development (she seemed to only be there to signify that they started a family), but they are in their heads so much about the game, winning, and furthering their careers, that perhaps what we see says it all.
A knee injury on the court has prevented Tashi from playing anymore, so now she coaches Art, who has had a rough season. Patrick comes back into the mix as a player in the latest tournament. The movie takes us all over the place, for all the ebbs and flows of the friendships and relationships between these three people. Tashi, in particular, often doesn’t seem like a nice person. When either man says “I love you,” the best response she gives is “I know.” Overall, I was glad I wasn’t them, didn’t know them, and didn’t have their perceived problems. That’s not to say I wasn’t absolutely riveted and captivated by Challengers, because I was all in. Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” – which appears in the movie, playing in the background in a scene at an Applebee’s – says it best: “It oughta be easy, oughta be simple enough. Man meets woman, and they fall in love. But this house is haunted, and the ride gets rough.”
It all comes down to a showdown on the court between Art and Patrick. Let’s just say there is an enormous amount riding on it. I had different reasons for wanting each man to win, so either outcome would have been happy with a side of bittersweetness on the table. The best movies aren’t always the easiest to watch. I could imagine an alternate version – a safe, breezy sports romcom involving a love triangle and a little bit of friendly rivalry, and I’d ding it for taking the paths of least resistance and not going deep enough. I’d lament that it needed to be grittier, harder, harsher, and should have dug into those stakes. But instead, they do just that. Challengers is the movie it should be.
Grade: A-
Film Reviews by Mark 
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