Major spoilers for Challengers to follow.
Could Challengers have ended any other way? Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling sports romance takes a potently toxic love triangle and lays it bare on the court at a low-level championship final, where former best friends Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) thrash out a decade’s worth of hatred and sexual tension. In the stands watching is the proverbial third corner, Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), whose eyes are just as much of a catalyst for the ensuing chaos. (She’s Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex, it’s messy.)
What unfolds in the film’s visceral final minutes is some truly great fucking tennis. Art and Patrick in the final tie-break of an evenly-matched three-setter. With Patrick having revealed by a sneaky serve signal that he slept with Tashi the night before, Art is more fired up than he has ever been in his career. The pair hit some ferocious forehands, inching ever closer to the net. The camera takes the point of view of the ball, flying back and forth in a dizzying rally that heats up to a ludicrous series of rapid volleys that seems to never end. When Patrick attempts a lob, Art leaps above to smash the ball, tripping over the net and falling into Patrick’s arms. Every person in the crowd starts to breathe again, Tashi included. “COME ON!!” she yells, as all tension is released in a euphoric laugh. For a film that doesn’t venture beyond tongue-heavy kissing, the sequence is the closest thing Challengers has to actual sex.
And with that, we leave the final without a winner. Even though Patrick failed to return the shot, Art did touch the net, meaning the point goes to Patrick. But the credits roll without revealing who ultimately won the match. It can perhaps feel dissatisfying to leave Challengers without knowing who emerged victorious. But it was never about who wins or loses the match — it was about the heady cocktail of love, sex and, yes, tennis that the central trio find so intoxicating.
Everything can be traced back to the first night Tashi, Art and Patrick spent together. On a beach outside a cushy US Open party Adidas has arranged for Tashi, she perches like a siren as she educates the two boys about her match earlier that day. “It’s a relationship,” she explains, laying a theory that tennis is an exercise in synchronicity. “For about 15 seconds there, we were actually playing tennis and we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It was like we were in love, or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.”
Tashi never quite reaches the delirious heights of that US Open match. And it’s that elusive “somewhere” Tashi speaks of that she continues to search for in the years after, once a crushing knee injury puts an end to her career. Everything has been in service of replicating this dynamite feeling that Tashi craves. She attempts to live vicariously through the two men in her life, but comes up short: Patrick has resigned to playing in tiny towns for meagre ranking points, while Art’s love for the sport dissipates.
And so perhaps Tashi knew deep down, as she sneakily orchestrates to have Patrick and Art play for life-and-death stakes, that there’s an inexplicable energy that can only be captured by having the three of them together again. The ensuing match proves Tashi’s theory in real-time, embodied by the maniacal camera moves that place the viewer right at the centre of it all. By the end, Tashi explodes with the same scream she unleashed as a teenager, bringing the trio back full circle to the magic of their youth. Game, set, match: Tashi won.
