‘Challengers’ review: You’re not ready for Zendaya’s horny love-triangle drama

This isn’t a judgment, more of an observation: Challengers has come to leave you ragged. 

The first time I watched Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, I was so overwhelmed by its titillating sexual tension and exhilarating interpersonal drama that I struggled to find the words to describe it. The second time, I was very aware of the audience members around me who were audibly shocked and awed by the sweaty game this love-triangle drama plays. Some clucked, metaphorically clutching pearls, whenever child-star-turned-cinema-It-Girl Zendaya snarled a curse word or slid into a sexy scene. Behind me, an older man grumbled anytime things between leading men Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor got homoerotic. And this is a Luca Guadagnino movie, so that happened often. 

American audiences might mistake Challengers for a sexy American sports movie, like Bull Durham. After all, it’s a U.S.-set tale of tennis, produced by MGM, and headlined by one of our nation’s hottest actresses, as well as one of the heralded stars of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. They might assume they know what they’re getting into. But the Sicilian filmmaker behind Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All has used both peaches and cannibalism (separately) as visual metaphors for the carnal nature of lust. Naturally, his version of a sports movie is far more lurid, feeling distinctly European. 

Sensual longing radiates in every scene of Challengers, even though the love scenes are most shocking in how little sex they actually show. And yet, you will be scorched by the heat, as Guadagnino has put together one of the hottest love triangles cinema has ever seen… if not the very hottest. 

What is Challengers about? 

Written by Justin Kuritzkes (the husband of celebrated Past Lives writer/director Celine Song), Challengers explores the complicated relationship between three young tennis players. Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) relish playing together, even though they are miles apart in personality. Where Art is clean-cut, hardworking, and earnest, Patrick is a bad boy whose serves are as wild as his impulsive pronouncements. As adults, they’ll face off with the former looking like a polished god of the sport, clad in sparkling tennis whites bearing his own logo, and the latter looking like a down-and-out loser, with scruffy facial hair and an outfit that is so wrinkled and grungy you can practically smell the stale sweat. 

At the start of this story, they’ve been greatest friends since boarding school and are closer than brothers. Then they meet Tashi Duncan, an “18-year-old phenom” who plays tennis with a ferocity that stops them in their big-talking tracks. When both of them ask for her number, she warns she’s “not a home-wrecker,” immediately sensing the bond between them. Still, she promises her digits to whoever wins their next match. But Tashi is no trophy to be won. Kuritzkes paints her as a brilliant and brutal strategist on the court and off. By the time they’re in their early thirties, she’ll be married to one of these men, while the other is left on the sidelines. But that’s far from the end of their story. Kuritzkes’ script nimbly leaps back and forth between their teens and twenties and the present, never missing a beat to put them — and us — through the emotional wringer. And as these three flirt, fumble, fuck, and break each others’ hearts, Challengers tantalizes with its ambush of raw emotions and gnarled repressions. 

Challengers is hot, horny, and smart. 

Credit: Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

As teased in the trailer that set the internet ablaze, Tashi, Art, and Patrick share a chaotic chemistry that leads to a life-changing three-way kiss. Those hoping for a threesome throw down might initially be disappointed here, as there is no literal group sex — neither on screen nor implied offscreen. However, using tennis as a metaphor, every grunt, groan, and drip of sweat (all of which are generously dispersed) has a sexual implication.

In the first act, it’s Tashi’s intensity and confident athleticism on the court that not only make Patrick and Art stand to attention, but also clutch at each other in uncontrollable excitement. When she scores the winning point, she doesn’t cheer; she yells deep and loud, “COME ON!” It’s primal, and when asked about it later, she’s unashamed. Tashi explains that to her, tennis — good tennis — “is a relationship” that’s honest. “We understand each other,” she says of her opponent, comparing the connection on the court to being in love. But when it comes to love off the court, none of these three can dare be so open. There’s too much to lose. 

The metaphor plays out on the court and in dorm rooms, hotel rooms, and secret rendezvous, through a heated exchange of frenzied kisses and hands groping with firm passion. When the men offer confessions of love or attraction to her, Tashi hits back with whip-smart remarks. “You’d have a better shot with a handgun in your mouth,” for example, is a cold line that earns a laugh from the audience, but there’s heat underneath it all, building and burning. Over the course of a story that stretches over a decade, and a movie that bounces from a tennis showdown to the love triangle at its breaking point, the sexual tension between its leads is unrelentingly electrifying. 

Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor set the screen on fire in Challengers. 

Credit: Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

There’s a powerful balance struck in this trio. Faist plays the romantic, his eyes — which yearned for Tony in West Side Story — are now hopefully locked in on Tashi’s banging backhand. Shaking off the macho posturing of Riff, Faist is almost achingly vulnerable as the athlete who plays by the rules with his heart on his sleeve. But there’s a cruelty in Art’s lovestruck quest, and that is not lost in Faist’s performance. A steeliness enters his gaze. A stiffness intrudes on his walk as he strives to cover his tracks or hide his heartbreak. 

In comparison, Zendaya’s Tashi might seem stoic. But her eye is on the ball, as it were. As a girl, her physicality has a lightness, but no naïveté. When she enters the hotel room shared by Patrick and Art, she’s no lost lamb among lions; she’s on the prowl. Within tennis’s world of whiteness, wealth, and its associated privileges, Tashi knows she — as a Black woman whose family isn’t old money — plays by different rules than these white boys. Subtle nods in Kuritzkes’ script scratch at racial and economic tension, like Tashi noting matter-of-factly that another contender is a “racist bitch” or curtly explaining her family couldn’t afford to send her to a boarding school. What’s unspoken is that her place here is more precarious than theirs. So, even when she’s off the court, her mind is in the game. Zendaya expresses this pressure through sharp glares, icy delivery, and a tendency to swallow her bottom lip, as if she’s sucking back the righteous rage she’d be judged for letting out. 

In the face of this fury, Patrick might come off as a clown by contrast. Devoted to not taking anything – especially himself — too seriously, he’s a charming hedonist who gleefully rejects every boundary and social nicety. When visiting Art in college, Patrick bounds onto the court in jeans, whooping and chasing his friend like they’re kids again. In the mess hall, he gobbles Art’s churro (this is not a euphemism) with a mischievous smile. And towards Tashi, his ravenousness is just as rampant. O’Connor, who wowed critics in 2017 with his performance in the gay drama God’s Own Country, is feral with charisma, bursting with bravado and allure, yet carrying a dizzying anxiety in every twitching smile. 

On a first watch, O’Connor is dynamic, and a terrific scene partner. The same can be said for all three leads. But on a second watch, he’s the MVP. Though Patrick has a big mouth, he doesn’t dare admit what he really feels in his core. Instead, O’Connor reveals the truth in fleeting moments of reckless vulnerability with a tell, a twitch in his smile. Then Guadagnino underscores these driving but unvoiced emotions through cinematography and an immersive soundscape. 

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is one of 2024’s greatest. 

Credit: Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Melding music with the moans of the court, Guadagnino brought on two-time Academy Award-winning composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to deliver a score that envelopes audiences in adrenaline. While the Challengers soundtrack is peppered with hit dance songs from Donna Summer, Lily Allen, and Nelly, the score from Reznor and Ross is house music unleashed. While the screen fills with close-ups of the tennis players’ faces, or long shots of them loping across the green in slow-motion, the music is a heady thrum of synth keyboards turning the court into a dance club. It’s a musical soundscape that screams of exhilaration, pumping into our veins so our hearts might race along with the characters’. 

Likewise, the cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (whose credits include Call Me by Your Name and Guadagnino’s Suspiria) emphasizes intimacy on the court and the intensity of verbal volleys off it. Cowboy close-ups bring us inches away from the sweating brows of these lovers, inviting us to look into their eyes and intuit what feelings roar behind them. A heated exchange in a sauna is heightened by blocking that puts Art up high and Patrick down low, reflecting not only their status in the moment but also a provocative sense of sexual supplication, emphasized by dueling POV shots. A particularly harsh argument between lovers includes a whip-pan from one player to the other, as if we are watching the tennis ball zing back and forth. 

All of these meticulous details build something alive and miraculous. Challengers is not just a sexy love story or a suspenseful sports movie. Imbued with adrenaline in every frame, note, and beat, it is a breathtaking cinematic experience that thrusts you into the center of this love triangle, bounces you about like a ball that lives for the racket’s smack, and leaves you breathless with a finale that is indulgent yet deeply satisfying. While it may be too much for some audiences to handle, there’s no doubt Challengers is hands down one of the greatest and sexiest films of the year. 

Challengers opens in theaters April 26.