"Challengers:" A Supercharged Love Triangle of Destructive Proportions

Luca Guadagnino and a stellar cast turn out a sweaty mess of psychosexual mania.

May 25, 2024

When three young, hot people meet, and one gets ogled as the other two develop mutual loathing rooted in sexual jealousy and romantic competition, an inevitability comes to pass. It’s a tale as old as time, true as it can be: the love triangle.

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If one gave a bone for each time this phenomenon played out on screen, they’d be only a blood bag. As with any horse that’s been beaten long after its death, it feels pointless. After all, what use does one have for a dead horse, and what purpose is there to repeatedly striking it?

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Well, sometimes a movie arrests us so completely that it makes the seemingly pointless feel purposeful, a fresh spin on an old idea.

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Challengers is one such movie.

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In the mid-2000s, teenage tennis phenom Tashi Duncan meets up-and-coming doubles partners and boarding school besties Art Donaldson and Patrick Zweig. The two become instantly enamored with her, but for wildly different reasons. Art, docile and agreeable, is awed by Tashi’s gamesmanship. Patrick, the more rugged and, for lack of a better word, challenging, instantly sexualizes her.

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Weaponizing her allure, Tashi elicits an embarrassing sexual confession from the friends before instigating a brief, sexually charged encounter. After promising her number to the winner of their singles match the following day, she leaves. Patrick beats Art, and he and Tashi begin a relationship, sparking over a decade of sexual tension, fractured friendship, romantic tug-of-war, and a pot of simmering resentment, ambition, lust, and competition.

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It’s a movie that would’ve been easy to make exploitative. Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, who play Art and Patrick, respectively, are two beautiful men whose athletic ambitions frequently leave their sweat-drenched torsos glistening in the sunlight, their muscular legs straining as they dart back and forth on the tennis court. They’re hot, and anyone with eyes would be overjoyed to ogle them; by not shying away from that and playing coy instead of being overt, Challengers allows what would ordinarily be labeled homoeroticism to be a necessary wrinkle in a richly complex friendship.

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Sure, randy gays will insist that the passionate kiss Art and Patrick get deceived into sharing by Tashi or the embarrassing personal confession of pre-adolescent pseudo-experimentation are blatant indications of the characters’ latent bisexuality, but they’re merely devices to establish the control she has over these men and a more honest exploration of the backstory between two male, heterosexual friends, each ethically bankrupt and opportunistic in his own right, yet strangely devoted to one another.

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That subtle, homoerotic mastery provides the necessary substance to convince us of this toxic dynamic. To succeed, Challengers must make us invested in the outcome of Art and Patrick’s grudge match by establishing its psychological stakes, legitimizing their friendship beyond generalities. It cannot be some early-life tragedy that bonds them, antiquated notions of male dynamics, or simply having known each other for a long time. It has to run deeper; we need unaffected affection. It may seem silly to harp on something as minor as one man scooting a chair closer before his friend takes his seat, but those small yet highly pronounced moments make their friendship feel genuinely close.

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Without that closeness, the film’s developments wouldn't hold water, even though the trailers try to convince you that Zendaya’s Tashi commands the film. She’s stellar in an equally stellar role, but everything she does is meaningless without Art and Patrick’s bond being initially tenable. We have to see that the two men lay on opposite ends of the spectrum, one enraptured with Tashi’s beauty and the other in awe of her craftsmanship to make her exploitation of both perspectives and wicked ability to dismantle them (while exploitatively heightening) them feel reasonable and not the half-assed construction of another thinly-imagined poisonous viper.

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With director Luca Guadagnino’s delicate yet visceral touch, we do see those things and watch in frustrated wonderment as the trio spends years ravaging each other’s lives. We anguish over Art and Patrick’s severed bond, get frustrated at their childish inability to place a bro before a ho, and resent their mutual immaturity, where the former upends the latter’s relationship with Tashi out of jealousy after the latter refuses to step aside when it’s clear his friend feels something deeper than sexual desire.

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We hate that Patrick performs the typical duties of a horny heterosexual man, deciding for a woman who she is and what she wants because it fits into the box of things he is willing to pursue and invest in, but get sobered by the realization that his assessment of Tashi is spot-on. We sympathize with Art, aching for his wife to love him as he loves her, but dismiss his frustrations in the face of how earnestly he snakes his way into her life at his best friend’s expense. We despise that Tashi goes unchecked by Art's fragility but loathe her inability to forgo her collegiate infatuation with a man who's accomplished even less than the husband she resents.

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Everyone is right and wrong, so we take each of the thousand angles from which Challengers explores its three-person dynamic at full force. Few movies can create something so varied without sacrificing realism. As soapy as its narrative is conceptually, the final product is what matters; Challengers legitimizes what would ordinarily seem impossible to legitimize.

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Tashi is manipulative and cold but assured and justified in her frustrations with Art’s professional reservedness. Patrick is smug and insensitive but caring and perversely selfless. Art is conniving and wimpy but soulful and capable of seeing more to people than what others see. After all, he’s the one who appreciates Tashi’s game above her beauty and is friends with Patrick despite his womanizing and questionable character. Yet, even though no one is particularly likable, there’s an inherent quality to each of them that makes them rootable, which layers the film as we struggle to form an opinion of how we’d like the story to conclude. With so many conflicting ideas and motivations bouncing between everyone, like the balls on a tennis court, we feel torn as the story unfolds.

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Sure, it showcases Mike Faist’s sweaty pecks and Josh O’Connor's hairy, muscular calves more often than necessary, not that anyone with functioning eyes will complain. Sure, it (somewhat) creates a lingering feeling that no matter how it concludes, it will feel like a cop-out. Yes, there’s something innately contradictory about a movie so immersed in the innate physicality of its sport and the sexual dynamics that dictate so much of the personal drama that ultimately has no actual sex scenes and has only one of its characters go nude, as Patrick postures to Art in the sauna.

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But for all the things one could nitpick, there are a hundred more that Challengers gets so right that it becomes the sort of movie you want to explore over and over again and wish Hollywood made more of: genuinely sexy, narratively gripping, defiant of clear-cut definitions of personal responsibility, capable of crafting a sincere male friendship, and featuring a small-cast who understands the assignment.

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It won’t please everyone, but at the center of Challengers’ greatness is this: Tashi never wanted to be a homewrecker, and no two friends ever want to lose each other, but this is the reality of competition, egomania, and love, as twisted and debatable as they can be. It’s harsh and unyielding; if those involved cannot genuinely evolve but only grow within their own narrow perspective, it can last a lifetime. The final shot establishes this truth, offering respite while having done a miraculous job of showing for the previous two hours that it will ultimately prove fleeting. The trio's fate is still tragic; we know precisely where each character would end up in a sequel, and it’s nowhere good.

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For something so charged, so reverential of the human form, and so chock-full of self-serving personalities to be so electrifying, the construction must be faultless. One could throw every tennis pun in the book to laud Guadagnino’s construction, and each would be just as corny and ham-fisted as accurate. So, for homoerotic pseudo-soap operas that look horrible on paper but find immense critical acclaim?

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Guadagnino - 20

Us - Love

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Sorry, couldn’t resist.