A former tennis prodigy now turned coach must force her husband to break his curse of lost confidence by beating his once friend turned arch rival, her ex boyfriend…

An absolutely propulsive exploration into the most primal form of love and lust, Challengers is a triumph of precise scripting working in tandem with explosive direction.

Luca Guadagnino has been a director working at the height of his artistic prowess for several years now (in 2024 alone, he released two films both of which are likely to be major awards contenders), but Challengers feels like the culmination of everything he has built towards, a stylish melodrama bristling with eroticism and levity at every turn.

With each frame of this carefully curated visual yearn-fest, Guadagnino obsessively highlights sex and lust without ever showcasing nudity. Each shot captures an essence of innuendo, a fascinating exploration of human bodies at the height of passion.

One could argue a sense of self indulgence in the camerawork here, often opting for the most interesting visual in lieu of something that may better serve the story, but big swings in the directorial vision are what make Challengers so much more than just another sports movie. Tennis becomes an allegorical concept for the violent lust of our three protagonists.

The screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes crafts three lovable anti-heroes each fighting through the pomp and frill of tennis and showmanship to capture the love that eternally waits on the other side of the literal and metaphorical net. Patrick, a self-admitted asshole, is perhaps the most honest of the three, always driving towards his goal with acute sincerity if not outright dismissiveness of the consequences.

Art tactically guides the game of their love triangle to his whims, yet he feels lost in wanting to settle his life and career down but being relegated to playing second fiddle to his wife’s passions.

Tashi is all at once the film’s most sympathetic character and its biggest villain, a woman so obsessed over control of her own life that once its stripped from her she has no choice but to find a vessel to live vicariously through, someone who still sees her as more than the promise of the woman she was in order to give purpose to the woman she wishes she could be.

The simplicity of this dynamic can be defined in primitive terms: Patrick wants Art, Art wants Tashi, and Tashi wants tennis (if you read deeper into that basic stating of wants, then you’re right where the film wants you to be). In framing this as the conceit of the story, every action and reaction enacted by these characters comes into focus through propulsive yearning and complicated backstabbing leading to a chaotic, nonlinear narrative that ups the stakes of every game with each subsequent scene.

It’s a masterful screenplay that Guadagnino mines every crevice of for maximum visual, political intrigue between these uniquely flawed and earnest characters. The performances from our three leads are reliably great particularly Josh O’Connor who imbues Patrick with such a breadth of hopefulness as he yearns to bring the band back together and live the glory days of bisexual passion.

The film is punctuated with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s finest score since The Social Network, a series of electronic, synth-heavy compositions that frenetically pulse through each scene in key moments to heighten the thematic correlation between tennis and life for these three challengers.

As someone who grew up with tennis, it came as a shock how easily Guadagnino and company crafted the scenes of the actual sport itself, treating each stroke as a piece of choreography and using a CGI ball to allow Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom to maneuver the camera with a series of increasingly stylish flourishes that capture the propulsive feeling of seeing truly great competitive play.

The movie earns its high stakes excitement, but its true mastery is in witnessing its effortless moments, the key points in which simply holding a ball between a racket’s base has stronger implications to the narrative than anything. 9.7/10