“Challengers” is a Dialogue Between Desire and Purpose

The fiery film explores the hunt for victory across personal and professional arenas

After director Luca Guadagnino’s breakout hit Call Me By Your Name, much of his filmography has focused on sexual discovery embedded within physical obsession — stripping the body down, as in Bones & All, or pushing it to its limits, as in his recent success, Challengers. 

The film follows three tennis stars whose lives have long intertwined — now, after years of navigating complex sexual and athletic competitions with each other, two of them face off at the final match of a local U.S. Open qualifying tournament. As the match unfolds, Challengers rewinds to reveal the fraught stages of their teen and adult lives, and the heat of competition on the court hardly as important as their jealousy and lust for one another. 

The Americana and gripping adrenaline of Challengers may feel like well-worn territory for the sports genre, but the intensity of the film is hardly rooted in the satisfaction of victory — instead, it posits that having a prize to play for is far more rewarding than holding that prize in your hands. It’s fitting that Guadagnino himself finds tennis boring, and without the need to objectively document the game, his cameras can instead explore the dynamics of bodies clashing and performing in pursuit of their prize. 

By forgoing an objective, quantitative account of the sport, Challengers’s presentation of tennis is tactile and expressive. Tension is built through the friction of the court surface, the lingering beads of sweat, the contortion of the body, and the growing intensity on their faces. Their game has always been as personal as it is professional, and as the film progresses, Guadagnino’s camera captures the matches with increasingly abstract techniques, not at all concerned with the scoreboard but instead with the embodiment of overwhelming desire. 

While the euphoria of competition is energizing, the most intriguing component of Challengers is its ongoing dialogue between desire and purpose. During their youth stardom, the characters tease and chastise each other about the importance of being more than someone who hits a ball with a racket, while simultaneously having never known a life that is not completely dependent on that very action. Tennis has made them millionaires in their twenties and washed up in their thirties, but prevented maturity. Their desire is uncontrollable but their time on the court (and subsequently, their purpose) is a clock ticking in their ears.

The thumping techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is the ultimate binding factor, uniting the play on the court and the promiscuity off of it, combining the hunt for desire and need for purpose into one. The pounding rhythm is the racing heartbeat of the film, rekindling the desire that keeps each of the characters alive. The tension of lust and competition has been tossed back and forth into different arenas of their lives, until all become one blinding, undistinguishable expression of longing. 

OVERALL SCORE: 8/10

Challengers was released on April 26, 2024 and is currently in U.S. theaters and streaming on demand.