Tennis is just the language. Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 hit, uses a nothing tournament in New Rochelle as the frame for a thirteen-year triangle between Tashi Duncan, a prodigy whose career ended on a ruined knee, her husband Art, a fading champion she rebuilt in her image, and Patrick, the broke ex-best-friend and ex-boyfriend on the other side of the net. Every point in the final is a conversation between three people who know exactly where to hurt each other.
Audience response ran hot from the start, and hot in both senses. Viewers celebrated it as the rare studio drama with style, sweat, and adult appetites, and its score became a phenomenon of its own. Division came with the territory. Some found the constant time jumps exhausting, others found the three leads too venomous to root for, and the ending set off arguments that are still going. Even the complaints tend to be delivered with energy, which suits a film that runs on it.
Three Players, One Score That Won’t Sit Still
The trio is the engine, and viewers rank the performances accordingly. Zendaya’s Tashi is the film’s center of gravity, a competitor who lost her outlet and turned coaching her husband into a substitute for playing, and the performance reads as ambition with nowhere healthy to go. Josh O’Connor got the loudest praise as Patrick, all rotten charm and unwashed confidence, sleeping in his car and grinning like he owns the tour. Mike Faist’s Art carries the quietest role, a champion running on empty who mostly wants the approval of the two people least equipped to give it. Their chemistry in every configuration, and the famous churro scene in particular, generated more discussion than most full franchises manage.
Reznor and Ross’s score is the other star. Instead of prestige-drama restraint, they deliver pounding club music that plays over rallies, arguments, and stares across locker rooms, and the effect rewires the whole film. Viewers describe sequences where the techno drops mid-match as pure adrenaline, sports filmmaking reimagined as dance floor. Guadagnino matches the audacity with swooping, experimental camerawork, including shots from beneath a transparent court and a climactic point filmed from the ball’s point of view. Some find those flourishes ridiculous. Most find them ridiculous and thrilling at once.
Structurally, the film plays its own game. It opens at match point stakes and then shuttles between the final and every stage of the triangle’s history, from a shared hotel room at eighteen to the wreckage of Tashi’s injury to a windswept parking lot confrontation the night before the tournament. When the structure works, and for most viewers it does, each flashback recharges the match with new information, so a routine service break lands like a betrayal revealed.
The Time Machine Gets Tiring
That structure is also the film’s most cited flaw. Challengers jumps timelines dozens of times, complete with on-screen labels counting years before the final, and a substantial group of viewers found the shuffling exhausting by the third act, arguing the story would lose nothing told straight. The film runs 131 minutes and feels its length to those not locked into its rhythm, with the middle stretch of career flashbacks drawing most of the pacing complaints.
Likability is the second fault line. All three characters are manipulative, self-absorbed, and cruel in rotation, and viewers who need someone to root for find the film an expensive seat at someone else’s toxic group chat. Defenders consider the venom the point. Detractors just find it wearying.
Then there’s the ending, which cuts away at a moment some consider perfect and others consider a cheat. Without spoiling it, the film declines to resolve the thing a sports movie normally exists to resolve, landing instead on an ambiguous emotional beat mid-air. Post-credits arguments about what it means, and whether it’s profound or evasive, became half the film’s cultural life. The tennis itself draws scattered complaints too, with players noting the doubled bodies and rubbery physics in the most stylized rallies.
The Sports Movie That Isn’t About Winning
Challengers makes more sense once you accept that the tournament bracket is irrelevant. Guadagnino has no interest in underdogs or trophies. The film is about competition as intimacy, three people who can only communicate honestly through a net, and the final match matters because it’s the first honest conversation they’ve had in years. That’s why the score sounds like a club and the last shot lands where it does. Viewers who came for a tennis drama often left confused. Viewers who realized they were watching a relationship drama in athletic wear tend to call it one of the year’s best.
Should You Watch Challengers?
Watch it if you want a drama with actual pulse, three movie stars in peak form, and filmmaking that swings big on every shot. It’s also the rare recent film that works as a date movie and an argument starter in equal measure.
Skip it if nonlinear storytelling annoys you, if you need a character to like, or if an unresolved ending will sour the previous two hours. This film withholds tidy payoffs on principle.
The Verdict on Challengers
Challengers is a jolt of style and spite that most dramas this decade wouldn’t dare attempt. Guadagnino turns a love triangle into a full-contact sport, the leads make cruelty magnetic, and the Reznor and Ross score deserves its reputation as the year’s best. Its time-hopping structure costs it some viewers and its ending costs it others, and the film clearly considers both prices worth paying. Games, sets, and matches get won elsewhere. This one plays for blood and leaves the scoreboard blank on purpose.