🧂 Challengers (2024)

Luca Guadagnino turns a tennis match into a three-way psychological death match, then can't resist ending it on a shrug instead of a scoreline.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino. Distributed by Amazon MGM Studios. 2024.

🧂 Salt: 5 / 10. A movie this disciplined about tracking its characters' every motive doesn't need to dodge the finish line. and ⭐ Stars: 7 / 10. Ferociously stylish, superbly acted, and smarter about desire and competition than almost anything else in theaters that year.

Three people, one ball, and the only honest conversation any of them have all movie happens over a net.

Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) was supposed to be the best women's tennis player of her generation until a knee injury ended that future before it started. Now she coaches her husband, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a Grand Slam champion sliding into a confidence-killing slump. To shake him loose before a major, she enters him in a bottom-rung Challenger event in New Rochelle, only for the draw to pit him against Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor), his former best friend, her ex-boyfriend, and the one person alive who still knows exactly where his cracks are. Director Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes shatter the timeline into fragments spanning thirteen years, cutting between the match's final set and the decade of wreckage that put these three on opposite sides of the net.

Zendaya's Tashi is the coldest, smartest character in the film, and the movie never asks us to like her for it. Tashi treats Art and Patrick's hearts the way she once treated an opponent's backhand: a weakness to be identified and exploited at the right moment. Zendaya plays her with a stillness that reads as total command right up until the flashback to the injury that ended her career, where thirteen years of composure drops away in about four seconds of pure, unguarded panic.

Josh O'Connor's Patrick is a gorgeous disaster, and the film's funniest, saddest creation. Patrick never recovered from being the most naturally talented of the three and doing the least with it; O'Connor plays him sleeping in his car between Challenger-tour stops with the loose, self-destructive charm of a guy who genuinely believes his talent will eventually show up and rescue him. He's the only one of the three allowed to be funny on purpose, and he never once lets Patrick curdle into a punchline.

Mike Faist's Art is the quietest performance of the three, and arguably the hardest one to pull off. Art is the "winner" by every metric the film tracks, majors, a marriage, a kid on the way, and Faist plays him as a man who suspects, correctly, that his adult life has been assembled around a decision Tashi made for him on a hotel room floor when he was nineteen. His blankness in his biggest matches isn't a flat performance; it's a character running out of reasons to care about winning something he's not sure he ever wanted.

The hotel-room scene is the film at its most electric, and also its most show-offy. Guadagnino stages the three of them circling each other, half-flirting, half-negotiating a friendship none of them will survive, with a camera that refuses to sit still and a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score pulsing underneath like a second heartbeat in the room. It's thrilling, confident filmmaking. It's also the moment where style most obviously threatens to outrun substance, a tell for a movie that occasionally mistakes a great needle drop for a finished scene.

The final match's climax is a bold swing that lands on vibes rather than a payoff. After two hours of meticulously tracking exactly what every glance and lob between these three people means, the match point resolves on a freeze-frame and a scream instead of answering the question the film spent its whole runtime asking: what do these people actually want from each other now, with all the lying stripped away? It's deliberate, Guadagnino clearly prefers ecstasy to exposition, but it plays like a mic drop standing in for an answer the script couldn't quite land.

The verdict: a sports movie that understands desire is the real sport being played, carried by three performances that make a love triangle feel like match point every time. Zendaya is ruthless, O'Connor is heartbreaking, Faist quietly builds the saddest arc of the three without raising his voice, and Guadagnino shoots it like he's never been more excited to stand behind a camera. It just can't resist ending on a flourish instead of a resolution.

So why only five shakers? Because a film this rigorous about tracking its characters' motives for two hours shouldn't flinch at the finish line and trade a real resolution for a freeze-frame, and that's a structural cop-out dressed up as style, not a nitpick.

So does Challengers actually have something to say about love, or is it just a very good tennis match with main characters? Mostly the former, it just serves the ball and walks off the court before confirming where it landed.

Pass the salt. 🧂