Let That Sweat Drip, Let That Sex Swing Ye 'Challengers'

A film where everyone involved is all in and then some.

May 07, 2024

Dear Moviegoers,

There is only sex and death. Everything else is negotiable. “What else is there to talk about?” Filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s words/storytelling philosophy was on my mind when watching the tennis game at play in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, a film that’s been sold to us all on the stunning steam and bodacious bods of its three main players (or performers). Knowing that, according to Greenaway, there are only two important things in life, one of them being sex, is there room for anything else?

Well, at the center of the marketing for Challengers is a threesome make-out session between two young men and one young woman, which is suggested to go “all the way.” The theatrics are incredibly hot here, and for getting moviegoers into seats, any room for more could be bloating. And bloating is not hot.

The alluring Zendaya plays the equally dangerous mystery that is Tashi, a once sports prodigy turned coach due to a career-ending injury. Her client is her husband Art, played Mike Faist, who is in a champion’s burnout. The film starts as Art is confronted in a match by an old friend and Tashi’s ex-lover Patrick, played by Josh O’Connor. To the rest of the sports world, this is just a one-on-one match at a rinky-dink outing. To both the players and the coach, whose sex games in their youth led them to this moment, there’s more than what meets the tennis racket. More blue than green, if you catch the ball of my words. Shifting back and forth in time, from the match to past events, the film reveals more with what it withholds than anything it flat-out tells. Challengers is the zenith of cinematic show or tell, and it couldn’t be greater if it tried.

Winks, nods, sunglasses, positions, deep breaths that are felt hard within the chest, not-too-subtle moments with food, and more. The tension on display weaved from and in between the film’s three lovers, is told maybe comically but shown very dramatically. I think what I’m getting at is that if it weren’t for Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor’s chemistry and interpretations of self and one another, all perfectly unspoken, then Challengers would merely be a YA (young adult) farce. The movie moves across a decade or so, and we see the three characters age rather well from teens to (I think) late thirty-somethings. Makeup, clothing, and attitude go a long way.

Much has been written about Zendaya and her performance as Tashi, about how she’s better as script than on screen - so to speak, and about how Faist and O’Connor overshadow her. Those two are great, sure, but so is she. Zendaya has an aura in this film that could make her the all-powerful narrator who pulls the strings to her liking or an equally conflicted individual as part of a three-way tryst. This juggle of identity and ambiguity kept me on my toes, as she played into the expectations left by the film’s marketing, the expectations had by horny audiences, and the expectations from her past roles. She plays everyone against each other, ultimately toward one another, and to a fine and satisfying conclusion. Zendaya is the fire and the water.

Three adult lives, defined by one moment of teenage lust, complicated by a sport where going back and forth on movement is inherent, destined to never be known by anyone outside of their little triangle. It’s an intimate spectacle that grinds epically (in more ways than what is suggested). With that, Challengers is a film that ought to live on and repeat in different ways, over and over. It was a classic then, is a classic now and will be many more times later. Man, sex on the brain is just…so much better than death in mind. 5/5

Challengers is now playing in theaters.

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