April 29, 2024 · Watch the official trailer
If Zendaya never makes another franchise film – be that Marvel or “Dune” – audiences will still be well served with an incomparable young talent that knows how to devour dialogue with authority.
Her latest film, the romantic sports thriller drama “Challengers” directed by Luca Guadagnino, is daring, artfully seductive, maniacal, and brings about perhaps the most confident, dazzling performance of an established actress with an incredible future ahead of her.
“Challengers” follows her Tashi at the center of a love triangle between two former tennis doubles partners both vying for her affections and the relentlessness in which she pursues life and greatness at any cost. It’s a tricky, twisted game of cat-and-mouse that Tashi plays with both Art and Patrick and the film is perhaps the biggest showcase of Zendaya’s character work.
While the film ping pongs back and forth through time like a tennis ball bounding from side to side, the three leads are equally compelling both in their youth and mature turns.
Audiences familiar with Zendaya’s filmography to date will likely buy right in to Tashi’s early career and relish in the way the star is able to manipulate both of her suitors with an off-hand casualness that marks the bravado of youthful invincibility. Once the film is fully realized in the present, her Tashi is much more subtle, almost wryly underhanded in the ways she holds onto power and Zendaya is able to stride confidently throughout these scenes without overplaying her hand.
Both Mike Faist as Art and Josh O’Connor as Patrick more than hold their own against Zendaya in scene pairings that have the intimacy of live theater mixed with the flash of cinema, but it’s the awkwardly uneasy chemistry that two have with one another that gives “Challengers” added depth of character work.
O’Connor portrays Patrick with a gusto that overtly suggests Patrick’s insecurity issues, while Faist is exceptionally subdued, almost coquettish at times that helps reinforce the duality of the two characters, opposite sides of the same coin with identical goals confused by the push and pull that they receive not only from Tashi, but from each other as well.
While the film is clearly set in the world of tennis, “Challengers” constantly feels in conversation with more existential, thought-provoking dramas like “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and it will likely be in subsequent viewings where cinephiles will truly see the depths of the performances, Justin Kuritzkes’ magnetic screenplay, and Guadagnino’s masterful direction.
For his own part, Guadagnino takes great risks with the cinematography, both in the risqué pseudo-psychosexual love affairs Tashi carries on with both men, but also in the film’s numerous tennis sequences littered throughout.
It’s unusual for a drama of this style to be designed for viewing on an IMAX screen, but Guadagnino and director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom move brashly and confidently across the court, engaging and challenging the audience to keep up with the back and forth of each point to further the complex nuance of the triangle.
The film makes several references to how people aren’t watching tennis, rather relationships playing out on the court over the course of a match and the cinematography of “Challengers” truly plays into this notion on a deeper level. As things move toward a climax on the court, Guadagnino evokes the likes of Gus van Sant to disengage from the traditional ways of shooting a scene in order to heighten the tension and keep audiences weighted with bated breath.
While it’s too early in the year to be certain, “Challengers” feels like the sort of fringe awards contender that will be on many shortlists but not make the final cut in picture, acting, directing and screenplay categories that will leave viewers and critics calling it “snubbed” by the Academy in 2025.
Dazzling in spectacle and sharply constructed from start to finish, “Challengers” proves to be an exceptional turn in Zendaya’s filmography and one that should help Guadagnino films more accessible to a wider audience. While it might not be necessary to run to an IMAX, there’s not really much of a reason for avid cinephiles to miss out on perhaps the year’s most intriguing, sordidly spectacular drama in theaters.
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