Challengers
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Writer: Justin Kuritzkes
Cast: Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, Zendaya
Seen on: 10./11.1.2025

Plot:
Tashi (Zendaya) was a teenage tennis star until an injury ended her career. Now she manages her husband and fellow tennis player Art (Mike Faist). But Mike’s career has been taking a dive. He desperately needs a win, and for this win he has to face a match with Patrick (Josh O’Connor) who not only used to be his best friend but also his biggest rival on the court – and with Tashi.

Challengers is entertaining even to non-tennis people, has great performances and is absolutely immersive. But it could and should have been a little more, especially queerer, but also deeper.

As with many, if not all of Guadagnino’s movies, Challengers is an atmospheric masterpiece, capturing the tension between the characters on and off the court with precision and excitement. It almost makes tennis interesting even to someone like me. But in all this atmosphere, the movie often loses sight of its stories and its characters.

That’s how we get an absolutely jarring ending that is somewhere along the lines of the two guys looking at each other and going „bitches, amirite“, a misogynist wink that completely shafts Tashi and that I doubt was at all intended. Although it does the film justice insofar that it is always more about the relationship between Art and Patrick and what Tashi does to that relationship (whehter meaning to or not) than the relationships between Tashi and the two men in their own right.

I loved that Patrick is actually queer – all too often, love triangles are so goddamn straight it’s frustrating. But at the same time, I thought that the film would make more of that part (and the trailer promised that as well, if you ask me). Was Patrick in love with Art, too? Or was he just in love with Tashi and found Art hot? The movie doesn’t seem to care, but I would say that this would have been an important thing to know to understand their relationship.

In any case, the performances were fantastic, the pacing is fast, and I liked that there is even quite a bit of class criticism buried in here with Art’s and Patrick’s respective career trajectories. But I can’t help but feel a little disappointed because the film is just not as queer (or as sexual) as I thought.

Summarizing: worth seeing.