Challengers

Tashi, a tennis player turned coach, has transformed her husband from a mediocre player into a world-famous grand slam champion. To jolt him out of his recent losing streak, she makes him play a challenger event -- close to the lowest level of tournament on the pro tour. Tensions soon run high when he finds himself standing across the net from the once-promising, now burnt-out Patrick, his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.

Release date: April 22, 2024 (USA)

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros. Pictures, Amazon MGM Studios

Box office: $52.2 million

Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Music by: Trent Reznor; Atticus Ross

Luca Guadagnino directs “Challengers,” a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley. There’s even part of one match done from the point-of-view of a ball being smacked to-and-fro at high speed. It’s extravagantly goofy. But it’s also hilarious and wonderful, because it’s an objective correlative for how far the film will go to entertain you. 

Zendaya stars as Tashi, a former teenage tennis pro in the mold of one of the Williams sisters whose career on the court is ended by an injury and pivots to being a manager. Her only client is her husband Art (Mike Faist, who played Riff in “West Side Story”). Art is a nice guy who’s been a dominant force in men’s tennis thanks in large part to Tashi’s guidance and loyalty. Art is having an existential crisis when the story begins. Tashi gets the bright idea of having him enter a low-level championship match in hopes that he’ll reconnect with the energy that fueled him when she met him. 

But there’s a secret agenda here, one whose motivations and machinations we’re never entirely privy to: one of the players expected to appear at the match is Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a scruffy hustler who used to be best friends with Art until Tashi came between them. Like, literally came between them: one of many dazzling non-tennis showpieces in “Challengers” is a lengthy flashback scene wherein Tashi visits the motel room that the two guys are sharing during a tournament, slinks onto the bed with them, and makes out with both men simultaneously, until the point where Art and Patrick, who are so close and physically comfortable with each other that they could be mistaken for lovers anyway, start making out with each other, and Tashi coolly withdraws from the tangle of bodies and watches what she’s delighted to realize is her own handiwork.