Reviews

Zendaya firmly leaves behind her Disney Channel roots with Luca Guadagnino’s love triangle drama Challengers.

In this steamy romance film, she plays Tashi Duncan, a tennis player forced to give up her career after a serious knee injury. She becomes the coach to Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), who has been forever locked in a competition with his best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) over who can date her.

After settling down and having a child with Art, Tashi’s attraction to Patrick rises up again when the men face off against each other in the final of a Challengers tournament.

Considering Zendaya won Emmys for her acting in Euphoria, it’s a huge statement to say she gives her career-best performance in Challengers. Helped by Justin Kuritzkes’s smart and surprisingly hilarious script and Tashi’s no-nonsense character, Zendaya is remarkable here and it feels like you’re watching someone reach a new level in their career.

Her co-stars are equally excellent and bring interesting energy into the mix. Art is sweet, vulnerable and so in love with Tashi and Patrick is the charming womaniser she is drawn to, but you get the sense that Tashi enjoys playing with the power she holds over them.

A lot has been said about the film’s sexiness. This has been overhyped and there are no actual sex scenes. However, their chemistry is off the charts, the camera fully appreciates their hot bodies, and there are a few steamy moments.

Much like a tennis match, Challengers likes to hop back and forth in time, with the tournament being in the present and the flashbacks filling in the history of Tashi, Art and Patrick, who have known each other since they were teenagers. While the structure is understandable, it is sometimes hard to keep track of the narrative’s chronology and it threatens to kill the momentum.

Guadagnino hired Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to create a pulsating techno score, a sound you don’t usually hear in this kind of film. The score works so well with the pacey, exciting tennis matches but it’s frustratingly used during conversation scenes as well so it’s a struggle to hear what the characters are saying. It shouldn’t have been used there or it should have been lower in the sound mix.

With a trio of ace performances and a gripping story, Guadagnino knocks it out the park yet again.

In cinemas from Friday 26th May.

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