“Challengers” serves up a grand slam of psychosexual passion and tension

It's game, set, match for the must-see movie of the spring.

Sure, sex is great, but have you ever seen a really good game of tennis?

That is ostensibly (at least, in a tongue-in-cheek way) the question at the heart of Challengers, the riveting new drama from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name).

Built around a Challengers tournament match between former friends turned rivals, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), the film volleys between timelines as swiftly as a tennis ball, shading in the contours of the duo’s past. The lynchpin between them is Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), a promising young tennis star they both lust after. Tashi really only cares about one thing, though — tennis — and she pits the boys against each other with the aim of amping up their game.

After an initial dalliance with Patrick and a career-ending injury, Tashi comes to coach — and eventually marries — Art. She registers Art in a Challengers tournament, seemingly with the aim of boosting his confidence before he makes one last run at winning the U.S. Open — and their regrets and recriminations come to a head when he must face off against Patrick in the finals.

Justin Kuritzkes's twisty script leaves us guessing as the trio's mind games wreak havoc on each other and the audience all at once. Zendaya has called the project Codependency: The Movie, and it is a deliciously audacious tale of three damaged people who cannot live without each other. There is lust and loathing in equal measure, but the primary truism is that they are hopelessly entangled with each other, for better or worse.

Tashi’s kink is tennis — not mediocre or even good tennis, but fantastic, highlight-reel, once-in-a-generation tennis. From the moment she shows up to the boys’ hotel room late one night, initiates a three-way make-out session, and then promises to give her number to whichever one of them wins their match the next day, she appoints herself puppet-master of their lives to push them into playing that elusive perfect game.

Zendaya is the film’s murky center, a woman whose desires and goals are, at times, a mystery even to herself. As the teenage Tashi, a 19-year-old star who chooses Stanford University over the professional circuit, she expertly toes the line between adolescent angst and cool detachment. Even she seems uncertain whether she’s playing Art and Patrick against each other or accidentally playing herself. With her Disney Channel roots, Zendaya brings a complicated blend of earnest youthfulness and enigmatic candor to the role.

Her performance falters slightly as the older Tashi, wife to Art and mother of their child. She’s meant to be cold and calculating, but Zendaya has an inherent warmth that sometimes undercuts the chilly, pathological obsession with winning that defines Tashi’s raison d’etre. There’s no question she possesses the radiant confidence of an adult woman, but there’s still something girlish there. At times, it’s effective, making us question whether she’s the manipulator or the manipulated. But a deeper maturity, necessary to make the performance a true grand slam, is lacking.

Luckily, that gravitas comes via her two costars, Josh O’Connor (The Crown) and Mike Faist (West Side Story). O’Connor’s Patrick is all empty swagger, a smirking husk of a man with a gaping, ugly maw of want at his center. In contrast, Faist’s Art is the ultimate beta male, a guy who gets the girl through patient ingratiation rather than grandstanding (in contrast to Patrick’s literal dick-swinging).

Both actors have quickly become two of the most interesting young male stars working today. After breaking out in a Tony-nominated role in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway, Faist brought feral desperation to Riff, dancing away with Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. O’Connor won an Emmy for his portrayal of the bitterly overlooked young Prince Charles on The Crown.

Here, they complicate their “types," delivering two elegant backhanded serves of a performance. Faist channels his raw, wounded energy into Art’s pretty boy charm while the shrewd competitor remains visible in his keenly emotive eyes. O’Connor has found success playing hapless, unloved men, but here, his gift for inhabiting entitled figures lends him bravado and striking sex appeal.

The trio of actors all share a crackling chemistry, but the electricity between O’Connor and Faist is strongest. Both men engage in passionate scenes with Zendaya, making out in intense close-ups and tearing clothes off with palpable want. But none of those more physical scenes sear with the level of heat that O’Connor and Faist create with a mere shared glance.

Guadagnino laces the proceedings with potent homoeroticism, suggesting that Tashi is merely the conduit for the men’s lust and need for each other. It’s a psychosexual masterclass, their barely tamped-down desire colliding and exploding everywhere, from the tennis court to a steamy sauna.

The entire film can be encapsulated in that pivotal sauna scene where they circle each other like jungle cats. Art tries to conceal his longing with a false confidence while Patrick revels in his ability to unsettle his former friend. There’s nothing particularly subtle about their repressed desire — from the literality of a steam-filled room to the amount of phallic foods they swallow down (bananas, churros, hot dogs). But it’s so deliciously fun, it doesn’t matter.

This almost campy emphasis on sexual power dynamics is enhanced by Guadagnino’s shooting style. The director positions his camera in unexpected places, shooting a sloppy, tongue-filled kiss from a low-angle close-up, turning the audience into the tennis ball zooming back and forth, and even showing us the match from beneath the men’s shoes. We can viscerally feel the physical strain of the sport through these choices; the way the lift of a shirt's hem or the spring of a graceful serve is as carnal as sex for these three people. In Guadagnino’s hands, sex is a tennis match.

Not to be overlooked is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s spectacular score. Since 2010’s The Social Network, the duo has been expanding the possibilities of film’s aural landscape. Here, they craft a pulsating, synth-filled composition that ratchets up the tension until it’s taut as the strings of a racquet. It’s as if the U.S. Open decided to use sonic riffs from Miami Vice as a theme song. The electronic, staccato rhythm mimics the rapid back-and-forth of tennis while also catapulting us into a sound that is inherently sexy in the ways it evokes the hypnotic trance of a dance club.

Anchored by three arresting performances and playfully experimental direction, Challengers is fresh, exhilarating, and energetic. It pushes the boundaries of its devilishly fun packaging, exploring the power dynamics of sex, desire, and competition with a winking reminder that sometimes love is a zero-sum game. Grade: A-

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.