Challengers is a cinematic grand slam

It takes a lot for a director to emerge as the star of a movie with three terrific lead performances, but Luca Guadagnino has done just that with his new film Challengers.

The much-anticipated tennis drama sees three of cinema’s bright young things – Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist – steam up the screen with their tennis love triangle psychodrama. 

Much has been made about films looking like they were made for streaming and films looking like they were made for the cinema; Challengers is in the latter category.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino achieved mainstream success in 2017 with Call Me By Your Name after years of being the best European director you’ve never heard of, and it is refreshing to see a film sold on the director’s name along with a star like Zendaya.

The beauty of Challengers is Guadagnino smuggling his European arthouse sensibilities into a big-budget drama that is being put out by Warner Brothers.

The film manages to thread the needle of delivering on the great premise and giving the young stars a great showcase of their talents, while also letting Guadagnino put his own stamp on proceedings.

Challengers explores the story of two young tennis stars who fall for a fellow tennis champion and how chasing the affections of the same woman drastically changed the path of their lives.

Mike Faist, who was so brilliant in Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, and Josh O’Connor, who is best known for his star-making performance as a younger version of Charles on The Crown, are brilliantly cast as the young tennis stars.

The pair are wholly believable as childhood friends who have unresolved tension with each other after all these years.

Zendaya, who is quickly becoming one of her generation’s best talents, turns in maybe her best performance ever as the quasi-Lady MacBeth figure of the piece.

There are so many layers and hidden depths to her performance; she is just as happy to pit two men against each other as she is being the power behind the throne as well as her duties as a caring mother.

A great director knows exactly how to use an actor’s energy and gets the best out of them, and Guadagnino once again excels at making the actors on screen an extension of his cinematic language.

The Italian director has long spoken of his admiration for the late Jonathan Demme, and this film feels like his most intentional homage to the Silence Of The Lambs director yet.

The trademark Demme subjective camera is used here to great effect, and befitting of a film that tells a deeply personal story, it makes you feel like you are right there with the characters.

As with most of Guadagnino’s projects, the queer themes are front and centre.

While we will praise the tennis sequences later on in this review, the way this film handles complicated, messy queer dynamics is something to behold.

It would be easy for a film of this level to make the queer themes mere subtext, but Challengers tackles the themes with grace and style.

Only Guadagnino could stage a make-out session between three young people and imbue it with the excitement and explosiveness of a Mission Impossible heist.

With a film like this, you need a combination of great director, script and actors to bring it all together; if just one element is missing, the film falls apart.

Faist and O’Connor are superb in their roles with Faist playing the almost Kendall Roy-like spoilt child screw-up to perfection and O’Connor playing the arrested development, peaked at 18 mentality to a tee.

It is hard to pick between the three leading stars, but O’Connor gets the edge.

It is not a stretch to imagine all three stars getting Oscar nominations next year, but if we were cruelly asked to pick just one we would go for O’Connor.

Best known for his role on The Crown, O’Connor’s performance here is what should catapult him into the A-list just like how a young Timotheé Chalamet rocketed to the top after Call Me By Your Name.

There is some genuinely innovative cinematography on display here, with Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom deserving of his own shoutout.

Mukdeeprom was such an integral part of why Call Me By Your Name was so successful and his work on the underrated Ron Howard drama Thirteen Lives helped make that film stand out from the crowd.

The Thai man is a big reason why Challengers seamlessly blends together arthouse sensibilities and popcorn delight.

A sports movie is only as good as the sport being depicted, and the tennis action in Challengers is just as thrilling as the real thing.

Tennis and boxing are inherently cinematic sports, and Challengers is one of the best depictions of it.

One standout sequence sees the film shift into first-person and puts the audience on the court with the characters.

In what can only be described as a GoPro being strapped onto a tennis ball, the audience travels with the ball as it goes from one end of the court to the other.

One audaciously shot sequence has the characters on the tennis court existing in a negative space, with the entire world around them drowned out.

A less confident film would have let the tennis speak for itself, but Challengers is a supremely confident film that forces the audience to meet it on its own terms.

To reference our earlier point, this is a film designed for the cinema and would lose power if it was viewed at home.

It is exciting to see a new spin (pun intended) put on a well-documented sport like tennis; the film deploys the same techniques you see during a television broadcast then it deploys the European arthouse gaze to make the film soar.

Special mention must also go to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score.

The pair have created some of the best movie scores of the last 15 years – their David Fincher collaborations spring to mind – and the Challengers score is among their best work.

It is somewhat surreal hearing the Nine Inch Nails frontman compose what sounds like the lost New Order album for a tennis film, but the score is a perfect fit.

Reznor and Ross’ score for The Social Network challenged what a traditional film score could be back in 2010, and once again the pair have pushed the envelope.

Stop Making Sense still manages to draw a packed crowd 40 years later with people invited to get up and dance – it would be a massive missed opportunity if cinemas don’t host screenings of Challengers where people are encouraged to dance in front of the screen.

Challengers was slated to release last September but was pushed because of the dual Hollywood strikes; it is safe to say the wait has been worth it.

If Challengers doesn’t appear on our year-end top 10 list in December, we’ll eat a tennis racquet.