After a long delay that saw it drop out of the 2023 Venice Film Festival due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, the wait for “Challengers” is nearly over. Luca Guadagnino‘s erotic thriller, which stars Zendaya as a tennis prodigy who finds herself in a love triangle with two professional players after an injury forces her to retire, seems well-positioned to be one of spring’s biggest hits, thanks to its combination of star power and strong early reviews.
In a new featurette released by MGM, Guadagnino, Zendaya, and her “Challengers” co-stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist can be seen discussing the film‘s use of tennis as an allegory for sexual power dynamics.
“It’s like a tennis movie, but it’s not really about tennis,” Zendaya said. “Tennis is really just the outlet these characters use to express their chaos.”
Guadagnino explained how the main characters are so obsessed with tennis that they turn their love lives into a game that mirrors a match. The entire film follows a single match between O’Connor and Faist’s characters, with myriad flashbacks showing how the relationships between the three protagonists have become interwoven into a complex mess.
“This is a passionate love story where the rules of the game of tennis become the rules of the game of seduction,” Guadagnino said. “And that, for me, felt very cinematic.”
Early reviews for “Challengers” have been overwhelmingly positive, with many praising the film as one of Guadagnino’s most crowd-pleasing efforts to date without sacrificing his distinct understanding of the ways that repressed sexual desires shape human relationships.
“Here is a glistening, red-blooded, semi-American sports film where nobody wants to win at love because victory itself runs a distant second to the psychosexual ecstasy of having something worthwhile to play for, a reward that ultimately proves even more valuable than a USTA championship or Zendaya’s phone number,” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his review of the film. “If orgasms are little deaths, then it’s fitting that nobody in ‘Challengers’ ever has one on screen. These competitors only feel alive when they’re bound together by the mutual intimacy of being edged to the break points of their desire, and Guadagnino’s deliriously enjoyable movie doesn’t let any of its characters get off until even the most sophisticated Hawk-Eye line-calling technology on Earth would be unable to pinpoint the exact spot where tennis ends and sex begins.”
An MGM release, “Challengers” opens in theaters on Friday, April 26. Watch the new featurette below.
