Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Tennis player turned coach Tashi has taken her husband, Art, and transformed him into a world-famous Major champion. To jolt him out of his recent losing streak, she signs him up for a "Challenger" event — close to the lowest level of pro tournament — where he finds himself standing across the net from his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.
Challengers is a stylistically audacious psychosexual sports drama that stands apart through Luca Guadagnino's kinetic direction and Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross's pulsing electronic score. The non-linear structure and tennis-as-metaphor conceit are handled with genuine bravado, and Zendaya delivers a career-best commanding performance anchored by strong work from Faist and O'Connor. Roger Deakins-esque close cinematography and the famous POV tennis-ball shot make this one of the most visually distinctive sports films in years. The love-triangle plot itself is familiar territory and the ending, while viscerally charged, leaves some threads frustratingly unresolved rather than deliberately open — landing as ambiguous rather than resonant. Novelty is high because the film's specific combination of eroticism, competition, and Guadagnino's unmistakable sensibility makes it genuinely one-of-a-kind.