This article contains spoilers for “Challengers” (2024). Read at your own risk.

I’ll be honest with you: I was not a “Challengers” fan the first time around. When I went to see Luca Guadagnino’s sports drama during its opening week in April, I left the theater thinking that the film offered a fun watching experience, but little substance. I rolled my eyes at several lines of dialogue that lauded tennis as a metaphor for love, and giggled through the tennis match scenes as the camera’s point of view shifted from that of the game’s spectators, to the players, to the perspective of the tennis ball itself. While “Challengers” was undoubtedly entertaining upon first watch, I felt like the movie was playing up its own drama a bit too much; it was trying too hard. 

Everything changed last Friday when I stepped into the Goldsmith Family Cinema and sat among hundreds of my peers to see “Challengers” during the opening weekend of this semester’s Film Series. I was immersed in the decades-long torrid love affair among three complex individuals. Seeing this movie for the second time in six months, I was captivated from start to finish.

If any readers have dismissed “Challengers” as too melodramatic to take seriously (like I did initially), I implore you to read about how my second watching experience transformed my perspective on this excellent film.

“Challengers” finds professional tennis champion Art Donaldson (portrayed by Mike Faist) in a pivotal moment near the end of his career. With the US Open just weeks away, Art faces mounting pressure from his wife and coach Tashi Duncan (played by Zendaya) to jump start his declining game performances and win the Open. If Art can claim victory at the tournament, he’ll achieve a Career Grand Slam, the crowning accomplishment for any professional tennis player. For some real-life context, only eight men have ever completed Career Grand Slams in singles tournaments.

To boost Art’s waning confidence, Tashi enters him in a local tournament for lower-skilled professionals—a Challenger—so that he can have a guaranteed win. By some cruel twist of fate (and narrative necessity), Art and Tashi discover that he will play in the final of this Challenger against his former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend Patrick Zweig (depicted by Josh O’Connor), a washed-up junior tennis champion. The film mainly plays out this fateful match, interspersed with glimpses into Art, Tashi, and Patrick’s sordid past.

One of the things that shifted my opinion of the film on my second viewing was its deliberate exploration of each character’s complicated psychology and relationships with one another. Many films struggle to add much nuance to relationships between just two people. “Challengers” succeeds in showing exactly who each character is and why each of them is perfectly suited to get on the others’ last nerves.

Tashi is Art’s ruthless coach and emotionally unavailable wife, as well as a former junior tennis champion whose career comes to a screeching halt due to an injury she sustains at the gut-wrenching climax of the movie. She only cares about one thing: winning. As a player, she demolishes every opponent in her path and barely breaks a sweat. Excellence and discipline are her signature, and she expects the same of everyone around her. Her dedication to her craft is what makes watching her grapple with a career-ending injury the most devastating moment in the film, in spite of her apathetic demeanor and our prior knowledge that she was injured. Tensions in her relationship with Art grow from his inability to meet her soaring expectations, and she takes no pains expressing her disappointment. 

Art, the film’s only character who has actually achieved a successful career in professional tennis, still comes across as the most pathetic, as he spends every breath seeking Tashi’s love and approval from the moment they meet. While we are given several indications of Art’s success throughout the film’s flashback scenes, he clearly struggles against some insurmountable mental block to getting his groove back in the weeks leading up to the titular Challenger. While he should be able to defeat Patrick based on where they both are in their careers, Art still views himself as second best, standing in the shadow of Patrick’s star. 

Finally, Patrick is the character that most eludes description. It isn’t simple to pin down what exactly he wants out of his relationships with Tashi and Art, or even out of his own life. His narrative arc is a simple, but tragic one: his talent makes him an outstanding tennis player in his youth, but his ambitions for greatness are thwarted by his own aimlessness and lack of discipline. While Art’s marriage to Tashi is in jeopardy because he can’t reach her aspirations, Patrick’s relationship with her ends 13 years earlier because he doesn’t care enough to try. Ultimately, his presence at an amateur tournament is the result of wasted resources and time spent trying to make him a winner.

Of course, I’ll address the question on everyone’s minds: Who was most in the wrong? I want to be clear that all three characters lie, manipulate, and intentionally drive each other to the edge of sanity comparable amounts throughout the story. However, in my opinion, Tashi started it. She knew when she met Patrick and Art that she could make them do wild things in competition for her affection and subsequently, by her own admission, she became a homewrecker. If you disagree…don’t come for me.

Moving on from the fascinating character dynamics in “Challengers,” my favorite thing that I noticed while rewatching this movie was the brilliance of the narrative structure. The film creates a strong sense of parallelism between the final match of the Challenger played by Art and Patrick and their decades-long competition to win over Tashi. 

This new impression might be due to my recent uptick in consumption of sports and competition media this summer. I’ve really enjoyed Netflix’s recent forays into sports documentaries: “Break Point” (2022-23), which follows the newest generation of professional tennis players, and “Sprint” (2024), which is about Olympic-level runners. Hell, it could just be that we’re fresh off the 2024 Paris Olympics. Whatever the reason, I found tennis to be an incredible vehicle to carry the nuances of this complex character study. 

More and more, I find such joy in the story beats that are intrinsic to the sports genre: triumphs and defeats, falls from grace and comebacks, heroes and underdogs. While these tropes have been overused in many cases, seeing them introduced in a new way is both comforting and refreshing. Before “Challengers,” I’d never seen any sport be used so effectively as a metaphor for relationships. And while it might feel that the movie kinda hits you over the head with this theme, I still had a good time.

I also have to give a shoutout to this movie’s use of music. I love the “Challengers” soundtrack. The main musical motif (composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) that we hear during the film’s most tense moments is such an earworm. I’m not one for techno music generally, but something about the frenzied percussion worked with the heavy synth to heighten the stakes of the competition between Art and Patrick. I truly believe this soundtrack was the spiritual predecessor to brat summer. 

Finally, we have to talk about the ending of the movie. This is, by far, the aspect of the film that I’ve heard the most complaints about when discussing “Challengers.” The most pressing concern is who won the tennis match. My answer to that question is: Does it really matter? As Tashi says at the beginning of the film, “Tennis is a relationship.” The closure at the ending comes from Art and Patrick reconnecting after over a decade of resentment—not from one or the other coming out on top. 

I would also make the argument that it’s quite intentional on the part of the filmmakers that no one really wins at the end of the movie. If we’re adhering to the parallels between Art, Tashi, and Patrick’s lives and the tennis match, no one should win. I mean, Tashi and Art’s marriage is still in shambles, and Patrick’s still a broke loser, right?

Don’t get me wrong: enjoying “Challengers” genuinely requires a degree of silliness. The film is deliberately tongue-in-cheek about its characters’ intense outlooks on their lives. While professional athletes are incredibly dedicated to their sports, most aren’t prepared to throw a decades-long marriage away based on their partner’s win ratio. Guadagnino asks his audience to invest a lot of time and emotion in three extreme and, often, neurotic personas. But, if you’ve dismissed this movie in the past, I challenge you to suspend your disbelief just a bit more on your next watch. Lean into the extremities of this insane story. There’s a rollercoaster of suspense, intrigue, and passion waiting for you.

Sulan Bailey can be reached at sabailey@wesleyan.edu.