Challengers (2024) throbs and pulsates through the screen from beginning to end with its techno soundtrack and statuesque stars. It lets us in on a steamy, messy, and exciting love triangle that doesn’t allow a moment of rest. Using the framework of tennis, throwing us back and forth between different moments in the character’s lives, Challengers makes for a thrilling ride that needs to be seen to be believed.

Director Luca Guadagnino opens on the final match in slow motion and extremely close-up. Sweat dripping, eyes widening and anticipation building. The match is between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), former best friends whose lives were transformed thirteen years earlier when they met and both pined for the affection of another tennis player, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Once deemed a ‘tennis champion of tomorrow’, Tashi is now her husband, Art’s coach, as she suffered an injury, destroying her tennis career, and perhaps her one true love. It keeps us in this moment, flickering back to it, reminding us of the rage and loss leading up to this match. This structure makes the film fly by, even though it’s nearly two and a half hours long. The film itself is a tennis match, from the time jumps to the editing in conversation scenes, and this is what makes it so brilliant.

Everything other than tennis is a match, whilst actual tennis is a conversation. Tennis is fury, passion, desire, sex, power, vulnerability, perfection and grief. Tennis is everything that cannot be expressed in words. Tennis becomes a new kind of relationship; it is transcendent.

It would be a huge disservice to not mention that this is one of the sexiest films to grace the big screen in a long time, and what is so sexy about it isn’t on screen. The eroticism of Challengers is all in the sport. By allowing the implied to take precedence, the film leaves room for various interpretations upon rewatching, making for a new experience every time.

Challengers is a gift for people that crave open endings, with its homoerotic and very intense throuple. Challengers is one of those rare gems that solidifies itself as one-of-a-kind upon a first watch. It is what audiences have been missing, something that pushes the boundaries of filmmaking and reminds us that the medium is still young.

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