I’m just an effigy to be disgraced, to be defaced / Your need for me has been replaced / And if I can’t have everything, well, then just give me a taste
Nine Inch Nails, “Sin”
The game doesn’t start with a serve. By the time the ball reaches its apex, hanging suspended in anticipation for a brief moment – what comes next is just a formality. The outcome is unimportant. Punch in, and the volley determines everything, a decisive, blood pumping thrill of physicality. Punch out, and the volley is the fatalistic zenith of decades of an endless sweat-drenched psychosexual match point. Punch up the thrill by tossing the camera into the middle of it all and turning an entire film into a slick, pulse-pounding duel of timelines, the past colliding with the present until the pressure cooker reaches its breaking point. A fractal spiraling out from the squeaks of rubber on clay to a lifetime of decisions in a game you didn’t even know you were playing. Eventually, it all becomes one, a single moment of perfect understanding.
The cinema of Luca Guadagnino is coated in a thousand layers of desire-fueled destruction, emotion overtaking circumstance, a blending of the ethereal and the tactile. Love obliterates innocence, lust is a caustic mechanism careening towards violence, and everything is always building to a crushing moment where these ideas of overflowing desire and primal, animalistic physicality collide. As present in the ornate palatial confines of I Am Love (2009) as it is in the freewheeling sun-baked eroticism of A Bigger Splash (2015), torn down to its crimson sinew in Suspiria (2018) and literalized in the cannibalistic anguish of Bones and All (2022). Guillermo del Toro once said that you only make one movie, and for Guadagnino, Challengers is the ultimate version of his movie – a flashy, sexy thrill ride that teeters on the brink of an all-consuming eros and a vortex of complete annihilation.
Opening on a seemingly inconsequential tennis match at a small New York country club, Challengers announces itself the moment the first ball is served and the needle drops on an exhilarating, thudding 130 BPM techno-house track, an unrelentingly paced opener that sets the speed for the entire film. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have been doing nothing but stunning and singular scores since their work on The Social Network (2010) carved a space for themselves among the greatest film scores of all time, but their work here reaches a new level entirely. After opening with the aggressive, blood-pumping beat of its first scene, the sonic atmosphere rarely relents – like the entire film takes place in the confines of a bass-drowned nightclub laced with latent desire and raw sexuality.
A fitting culmination for Reznor as well, whose work has always been infused with its own razor thin line between blood and lust, an indescribably raw emotional state that is both aggressively expressive and enigmatically sexy. As if the twangy, brooding desire of “Pretty Hate Machine” had been broken down to its base components and reworked into a synth-laden, pulsating volley of expression. As if Reznor’s breathy refrain of “If she says give it all, I’ll give everything to her,” on “Sanctified” had been realized into a dizzying filmic synthesis. Though the film seldom takes its foot off the gas on its rapid, adrenaline-high beat, each song remains deeply felt, as much an emotional explosion during frantic dialogue as it is a driving meter to the rhythm of a high-stakes volley.
As Challengers develops, its seemingly inconsequential match soon becomes its fulcrum, a kickstart to the film’s unstoppable inertia of interwoven pasts, a call and response between scenes to culminate in a master stroke of cinematic release. Guadagnino would rather make the act of filmmaking into a sweat-soaked sport than make anything resembling a traditional sports film, leaving tennis as the desire-fueled consequence of a twisted game of fate. Ever since witnessing the ethereal and ferocious performance of Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) at the Junior U.S. Open, tennis prodigies Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) have been locked in an eternal battle for her affections, a delirious psychosexual love triangle that bounces back and forth as the film slowly reveals the length its players will go to in order to claw out their own grand slam, an indefinable victory which exists in a constant state of flux between each of them.
The film drips with palpable homoeroticism, each bead of sweat extracted with excruciating lust – it’s never crystal clear where the layered performances of desire end and where the final realization of who wants who ends – and maybe it doesn’t matter. Matches focus more on prolonged shots of bodies in motion than of the precise motions of the ball. Muscles pulse and limbs thrust, sweat drips from every pore, and when the ball is in motion it rockets straight through the lens. Every movement is an expression of a yearning powerful enough to shatter a racket, every glance a distant longing laced with the sinister machinations of a rapidly corroding triptych.
Guadagnino wielding Justin Kuritzke’s acid-soaked script makes for a spellbinding piece of cinematic delirium, a slow build of a thousand infinitesimal character motions that has your heart beating like you’ve been darting around a court all day before it even reaches its most exhilarating moment. There is no rise and fall here, it is all anticipation, waiting for the rollercoaster to drop as it races to the peak at full speed only to fly completely off the track. The film’s triumphant finale is an explosion of cinematic ecstasy, with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (a frequent collaborator of both Guadagnino and Thai slow cinema pioneer Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a stylistic synthesis which feels impossible and yet is fully present here) oversaturating each moment with stunning stylistic flourishes. Dizzying tennis-ball POV shots and hazy, sweaty step-printing, a double split-diopter and shots pointing towards the sky from beneath the court, as what was once a seemingly irrelevant local tennis match has become the greatest cinematic adrenaline rush in years. Guadagnino lays it bare and leaves no time for questions – existence is lust, existence is desire, and all we can do is play the game for the thrill of the adrenaline, in search of an ineffable cosmic singularity.