When These Three Play, It’s Not Love All

In Luca Guadagnino’s last film, 2022’s awful Bones and All, Timothée Chalamet played half of a young cannibal couple in love and on the run from a society that doesn’t understand them.

Now, Guadagnino’s followup features Chalamet’s Dune 2 costar playing a man-eater of a completely different sort.

In Challengers, Zendaya is Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy at the center of a love triangle involving her husband, Art (Mike Faist, West Side Story), and Patrick (Josh O’Connor, The Crown), who is Art’s former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend.

The trio meet when they’re all teenagers playing in a juniors tournament at the U.S. Open. The two guys are both infatuated with the ultra-competitive star, and she knows it. After a night of foreplay, Tashi raises the stakes for Art and Patrick when she says the winner of their tennis match the next day can have her phone number. Patrick comes out on top.

Then, while in college, a tragic injury ends Tashi’s career, and she dumps Patrick and hooks up with Art, becoming his coach and, eventually, his wife. 

Now, years later, Art is a Grand Slam champion on a losing streak. Tashi’s strategy to jolt him out of his doldrums involves a “Challenger” qualifying tournament — one of the lowest levels of professional play — where, it just so happens, Patrick is also a competitor.

Not that the movie follows such a linear narrative.

Written by Justin Kuritzkes (husband of Celine Song, writer/director of Past Lives, my favorite movie of 2023), Challengers bounces around a lot, like a ball on a court, telling its story through flashbacks and flashforwards, a device meant to keep the proceedings suspenseful so you never know just how much is happening naturally and how much has been orchestrated. The device is kind of annoying — especially since sometimes we flash back years and sometimes we flash back just a couple weeks, and sometimes we flash back years and then just weeks before that flashback. And when coupled with some of the lame dialogue, it’s like a double fault that makes the film less engaging. (“I’d let her fuck me with a racket” is just one example of the attempted bon mots.)

It doesn’t help that, while Faist and O’Connor are both better than the material they’re given, Zendaya is a weak link who’s trying too hard to play against type in a role that doesn’t really suit her. More so than Bones and All and Call Me by Your Name, Challengers feels like Guadagnino’s attempt to make a “grown-up” movie for younger audiences — and with Zendaya in the lead role, giving such an unbelievable, unconvincing performance, Challengers does feel like it’s squarely aimed at a less sophisticated Gen Z or Millennial audience.

Casting aside, it’s actually hard to root for either of these three characters. Unlikable characters isn’t a bad thing, per se. But it’s hard to be too invested in a film when you don’t want anyone to succeed.

Not that it’s all bad. The tennis scenes are generally action-packed and well shot (when we’re not watching the game from the POV of the ball, that is), and the techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is one of the best of the year so far.

At one point, Tashi says that tennis a relationship in which you and your opponent truly know each other. But unfortunately, this “sexy tennis” movie is more of an overlong tease than one that builds to a truly satisfying climax.

So I’m giving Challengers a C+.