“Tennis is a relationship,” Tashi (Zendaya), fresh off winning the US Open junior tournament, tells Art (Mike Faist, West Side Story) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor, wonderful in La Chimera), lifelong best friends and tennis doubles partners, newly smitten with their tourmate (“Look at that backhand!”). There’s heat between all three of them, yet she picks the winner, but over time comes to see them both as disappointments.

Years later, Tashi, Art, and Mike reunite at a minor Challenger tournament, a narrow corridor for those needing to boost their self-confidence or gain points to qualify for a Grand Slam. Art, a champion in the latter half of his career, is married to and coached by Tashi, now a former tennis hope whose career was cut short by a severe injury. Mike floats somewhere in anonymity (ranked 271st), never having reached his potential (“You always think you’ve won before the match is over,” Tashi tells him at one point). They all have a disproportionate motivation to win a tournament sponsored by a local tyre shop.

Of course, Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s latest film (Call Me By Your Name), is not about tennis. The sport is just a good pretext, the perfect setting for a love triangle: the two players placed symmetrically on either side of the net, with the trophy of their affection in the middle, opposite the umpire. Last but not least, sport is sex: you can see it in their eyes and cries of frustration or encouragement (Come on!). Even the structure of the tennis match, unfolding in three sets, each with its own outcome, fits perfectly into the convention of the three-act play.

Justin Kuritzkes’ precise screenplay comes across as a very hot but no less neurotic Gen Z version of something Woody Allen might write, centered around a very appealing and old-as-time tale: you rope three people around each other and see what happens — who willingly gets manipulated, whose turn it is to be the villain, who is the victim. Kuritzkes’ background as a playwright (now at his debut) shows in the way he builds his characters: with minimal context, relying almost exclusively on the interactions between the three, and not getting lost in secondary narrative threads. It’s up to Zendaya, Feist, and O’Connor to bear the brunt of generating enough sparks of attraction — convincing in both their teen and 30+ versions.

The three actors seem to be having at least as much fun as the director, who, assisted by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boonmee) and a very danceable techno soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, goes wild with staging some memorable matches, which are filmed like glossy Adidas ads, with subjective angles where even the ball has a POV, interspersed with the usual slow-motion shots of heated skin and sweat drops – no one has been able to film overheated bodies like Guadagnino since Jean Jacques Annaud’s L’amant.

I had some reservations after Bones and All, an uptight-artificial and rather precious arthouse film, but that wasn’t the case here. Guadagnino’s most playful and relaxed film (at least since A Bigger Splash), Challengers is, like tennis, a game about winning the points that really matter, full of instantly memorable images (O’Connor wearing a T-shirt with the inscription “I Told Ya”) and lines (“I’m taking such good care of my little white boys”), destined to go viral. Two hours that fly by at the cineplex.

Challengers enters theaters on April 26.

Dragoș Marin

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.