Challengers

“Challengers essentially treats queerness as a punchline or fan-bait.”

Title: Challengers (2024)
Director: Luca Guadagnino 👨🏽🇮🇹🌈
Writer: Justin Kuritzkes 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Joshua Harris 🧑🏽🇺🇸🌈

Technical: 3/5

Director Luca Guadagnino has become prolific in cinema, known for his intimate explorations of desire and queer identity. He’s also known for being provocative; works like Call Me By Your Name (2017) stumble into a predatory situation, whereas others, such as We Are Who We Are (2020), effectively tackle teenage identity, queer longing, and self-discovery in a way that resonates. This brings us to Guadagnino’s 2024 film, Challengers, which follows similar themes by zeroing in on tensions between personal and professional desires.

That said, its central ideas and connections are muddled. Challengers follows three tennis players—Tashi Duncan (a masterful Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor)—whose careers and personal lives become entangled in a web of rivalry, desire, and tension. The film delves into their love triangle across fifteen years, tracking the shifting power dynamics that ensue. Yet, in its latter half, melodramatic schemes and entanglements start to feel contrived. The final act offers no resolution, opting instead to hammer home an overblown message that tennis is a metaphor for power, sexuality, and love, all while neglecting to give any real weight to its characters or their emotions.

But narrative missteps aside, Challengers is technically accomplished. The striking cinematography builds excitement during the film's tennis matches and lingers carefully on its characters during pensive moments. The score, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, never simply functions as background music, instead driving the story forward with urgency and intensity. These choices ground the film in its setting, enriching the atmosphere without overshadowing the narrative. Unfortunately, shallow characters undermine the film’s overall impact.

Gender: 3.25/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Tashi, portrayed with a captivating blend of playfulness and ferocity by Zendaya, is unfortunately tied to the two male leads—or, as she refers to them, “her little white boys”—for the entirety of the film. Her introduction is framed through Art and Patrick’s perspective and defined by their infatuation for her as a tennis star and as an object of desire. True, the film frequently subverts the male gaze by shifting its focus instead to the bodies of its male leads. A key moment sees their kiss through Tashi's perspective. But this brief camera shift never expands into curiosity about Tashi’s own experiences as an athlete, a mother, or as an individual.

This disinterest feels extra noticeable when Tashi suffers a painful injury that alters her life’s trajectory. Guadagnino offers little insight into the emotional or psychological impact it has on her beyond its effect on her relationships with Art and Patrick. The filmmakers try to present Tashi as a fierce woman with evident agency, but when her motivations and actions are inextricably tied to the men in her life, it’s impossible to consider her truly empowered.

Race: 3.75/5

In real life, Black female tennis players navigate a charged space full of microaggressions and double standards. But you wouldn’t know it from Challengers. Here, Tashi’s Blackness goes largely unexplored; at most, the film makes a fleeting remark about the class differences between Tashi and the two white male leads, the latter attending a private boarding school where they have the opportunity to gain an athletic advantage. This light approach leaves a void in the narrative and contributes to the overall sense that the characters in Challengers are little more than two-dimensional archetypes.

Deduction for LGBTQ: -0.25

Written by a straight writer, Challengers skirts queerness through its central love triangle between a woman and two men. But rather than offering a genuine reflection on Art and Patrick’s desires and psychologies, Challengers essentially treats their sole kiss as a punchline or fan-bait. It’s not that queer representation needs to be overt to be meaningful, but it’s frustrating that the film oversimplifies its queer dynamic by never actualizing Art and Patrick’s feelings about each other.

Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.25/5

Challengers could have leveraged its many flashback scenes to add texture to its leading tennis players. But by the time the credits roll, it’s unclear who the story is truly about, or what their relationships mean. What could have been a thoughtful piece on intimacy and self-discovery instead feels like a steamy, shallow blockbuster.

Like Challengers? Try these other titles featuring love triangles.

Grade: CLiFebruary 6, 2025