Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Challengers’ on VOD, in Which a Sporting Zendaya Anchors a Wildly Entertaining Stylegasm

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) may be the sexiest movie ever that doesn’t have an actual sex scene in it. Horniness prevails in this movie that is somewhat romantic and absolutely a comedy but isn’t at all a “romantic comedy,” and a movie that’s set in the world of professional tennis but isn’t a “sports movie.” That’s how wriggly this one is, with Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor starring as tennis players who are all shiny and dripping with sweat, which isn’t a metaphor, because they’re HOT. How hot? As hell, my friends. As hell. 

CHALLENGERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The match is meaningless in the grand scheme of the sport of tennis: A championship match in the second-string Challenger tour set in the whocaresville of New Rochelle, New York, and the prize is a few thousand bucks. But the grand scheme of the sport of tennis isn’t privy to what’s been on the backburner for 13 years between its competitors, Art Donaldson (Faist) and Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). They sweat and serve and sweat and smash and sweat and grunt and lob and sweat and sweat and sweat. Yes, they sweat a lot. You expect it, since they’re in the sun and playing tennis in a significantly competitive manner. But in this context the sweat means something, especially when Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) sits in the front row, dead-center court, her head snapping back and forth with each volley: THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. We get Spaghetti Western closeups of all three sets of eyes. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. 

From here, mid-match, the narrative jumps all over hell and gone, first to TWO WEEKS EARLIER, when we learn that Art and Tashi are a married-with-a-daughter pro-tennis power couple looking over their shoulders on building-sized advertisements for luxury cars you’ll never afford. He’s the player, one U.S. Open win from potential hall-of-famedom; she’s an ex-player with a scar on her knee, and now his coach. Art’s struggling after a shoulder injury, so Tashi wild-cards him into the Challenger tournament to beat up on some patsies and get his confidence back. Patrick rolls into the tournament with a maxed-out credit card, and ends up sleeping in his Honda POS when he can’t charm the lady at the motel desk into IOUing him a room. Is this coincidence? Hell naw. This is destiny, I tell you. DESTINY.

THIRTEEN YEARS EARLIER, Art and Patrick are teenage best pals winning a doubles tournament and celebrating by joyously straddling each other’s sweat-soaked bodies on the court: Well then! Then they watch Tashi play – she’s a fearsomely competitive superstar who frustrates her opponent into screaming and yelling and smashing her racket while Art and Patrick’s pheromones burst, invisible but very much there and all over the damn place. She’s 18 and headed for Stanford just like Art and Patrick, who chat her up a bit and invite her back to their hotel room not expecting her to come and then she comes and gets them to tell the story about how Art taught Patrick how to masturbate when they were 12 and then sits between them on the bed as they kiss either side of her and she slips out and the boys are still kissing each other. Good one, Tashi. “I’m no homewrecker,” she says coyly and, before she exits stage right, thank you for playing, thank you very much, she adds that the winner of tomorrow’s singles match, Art vs. Patrick, gets her number. So, who does she want? “I want to see some good f—ing tennis,” she says.

At this point, the time hops occur with a frequency and convolution that inspires laughter every time another subtitle signals one. TWELVE YEARS EARLIER, TWO WEEKS BEFORE THAT, THIRTEEN YEARS LATER, etc. Oh, the tangled web they weave, and it’d be confusing in another movie, but not this one, which just keeps on rippin’ through Art and Tashi and Patrick’s soapy, sweaty love triangle, with many things spoken and many more not, which makes sense at least in an objective way, because the editor of this movie is a master. Meanwhile the great and mighty subjectivity of love and lust is subject to the characters’ roiling, gestating, curdling, fading-then-roaring-back messy-ass sloppo emotions, which the greatest editor who ever lived could never puzzle out into a linear story. Point being, there’s a high-stakes game within Art and Patrick’s low-stakes game, and we’re highly amused, and grateful (and titillated! Can’t forget the titillation!) to be privy to it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Woody Allen found a potent tennis metaphor in Match Point, and established the fractured-narrative-as-metaphor-for-the-chaos-of-love template with Annie Hall. Also, Wimbledon was so crushingly dull in retrospect, wasn’t it? 

Performance Worth Watching: The conflagration of Zendaya’s talent and star power has never been more potent in a film than it is here. Her ability to inject spirited comedy into a heavily dramatic moment – and vice versa – is tantalizing in its mendacious playfulness.

Memorable Dialogue: This, while Patrick and Tashi make out in a scene that I believe is set three (or two, or one?) years after 13 years ago:

Patrick: Are we still talking about tennis?

Tashi: I’m always talking about tennis.

Patrick: Can we not?

Tashi: Sure.

Sex and Skin: A couple of steamy makeout scenes and a locker-room scene that’s more of a cocker room scene.

Our Take: ARE WE TALKING ABOUT TENNIS OR WHAT. That’s the sly running joke throughout Challengers, and there’s a very strong argument to be made that nobody’s ever talking about tennis in the movie. The only metaphor one can derive is thus: Life is like tennis – sometimes you end up f—ing. Which is more of a mess than a metaphor, because the metaphors here are barely metaphorical. 

Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes entangle three souls rich with the spirit of competition on the court and off, and we’re left with the following tantalizing notion: If these people play and run and hit this hard on the court, what are they like in the bedroom? The filmmakers’ withholding of the satisfaction of watching anyone consummate their depthless libidinousness is just Spielberg not showing us the whole shark – remember, what we see in our imagination is far more powerful than anything playing out on the screen.

Some have criticized the film for being populated with prickly characters who are hard to love and a little bit thinly rendered, but some could also f— off, because the performances here are fizzy, elusive and fascinating, trafficking in ideas about the despair athletes feel as they age out of our passions, or are forced out by things beyond their control. More universal is the depiction of people reaching a miserable point in middle age where the freewheeling emotional experiences of youth are all but impossible to reinvigorate; if only we all had an obsessively competitive Zendaya to goose those feelings back to life, right? 

Guadagnino further fleshes out these people via his visual presentation of their actions and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ undeniable thundering-techno score – drums skitter as lovers’ arguments flare, and cuts between grand-slam ball-cam shots grow increasingly frenzied as long-held rivalries play out on the court. Beads and beads of sweat drip from faces and down legs and off elbows in slo-mo during a riveting, intense climax that caps off a highly entertaining movie with what else but an eruptive stylegasm. I roared with laughter – and finally, after two hours, felt the exhilaration of release.

Our Call: Few movies in recent memory have been as stylishly provocative as Challengers. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.