Zendaya shines in tennis-world love triangle Challengers

• Challengers
• Directed by Luca Guadagnino
• Written by Justin Kuritzkes
• Starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor
• Classification 14A; 131 minutes
• Opens in theatres April 26

Critic’s Pick

The sexiest movie of the year to feature exactly zero sex scenes, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, a love-triangle drama set amidst the world of professional tennis, arrives like a ball swatted straight to the solar plexus. This is a startlingly entertaining, erotically charged movie that hits its many targets with a kind of ferocious and crazed accuracy that’ll knock the wind, among other things, right out of you.

Bouncing back and forth in time like the most high intensity of matches, the film opens with tennis all-star Art (Mike Faist) trying to figure out his next move after falling into a losing-streak rut. At the behest of his demanding wife-slash-coach Tashi (Zendaya), Art signs up for a low-stakes tournament in New Rochelle, N.Y., where he just so happens to come up against the down-on-his-luck maverick Patrick (Josh O’Connor). As increasingly complicated flashbacks reveal, though, Art and Patrick were once best friends – the pair so closely bonded that they nearly scored a threesome back in their junior doubles days with Tashi, when she, too, was a young tennis phenom.

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With the story focused almost exclusively on just Tashi, Art and Patrick, Guadagnino creates a fevered, exhilarating epic that makes the smallest of personal dramas feel magnificently epic. As the film pushes through the paces of Art and Patrick’s New Rochelle match – all sweat and grunts, gradual victories and temporary defeats – Guadagnino delicately and precisely peels back layer after layer of their relationship with one another, and Tashi.

There might not be anything especially profound about watching two men come to the realization that they’re not fighting over the same woman but actually wrestling with their feelings for each other – briefly, it feels as if screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes might have had Y tu mamá también on repeat in the background while working – but Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, A Bigger Splash) powers it all with such seductive brio that the film lands like a revelation.

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Powered by a heart-pounding score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and its criss-cross timeline assembled with a slick confidence by Marco Costa, Challengers is ruthlessly enthralling.

And yes, it is completely and irresistibly sexy – even if, or perhaps because, Guadagnino resists temptation to go fully under the covers, instead edging his audience right up the edge of sex. There might be more full-frontal male nudity here than in any other Hollywood film this year – to say nothing of the buckets and buckets of sweat that Guadagnino splashes on the screen – but the film’s eroticism comes purely from the potential of bodies colliding.

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Of course, it might be hard to go about who gets it on with whom were it not for the work of Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor – three impossibly beautiful people, certainly, but also performers who expertly click with each other, all while riding Guadagnino’s very particular wavelength. Faist, best known for his breakout work in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, burrows so deep into the cuckolded neuroticism of Art that it’s hard to imagine the actor ever getting out the other side alive, while O’Connor delivers the perfect mesh of jerk and genius. And Zendaya, already dominating screens in Dune: Part Two, gets to throw herself into an extremely complicated role with playful abandon.

Those who pay careful attention to on-screen credits will have an, ahem, ball when noting that Kuritzkes – miraculously delivering a completely original story, not based on any novel or existing property – is married to South Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song, who just delivered last year’s big love-triangle movie, Past Lives. To be a fly on the wall in that couple’s bedroom would be something worthy of its own Guadagnino film. Some things, though, are perhaps best left under the covers.