Challengers-A Thrilling Love Triangle Told With Propulsive, Intoxicating Filmmaking

Challengers is a movie about the emotional high of relationships- the exhilarating feeling that comes from connecting with another human being, both on a romantic and platonic level. It's also a movie about characters manipulating each other to make that emotional high even stronger. It's an enriching love triangle featuring a captivating trio at its center. There's Art, an explicitly submissive man who lets himself get pushed around, Patrick, a man who is just as submissive but who puts on a dominant facade. And at the center of it all, there's Tashi, an intelligent, strong-willed, and capable woman who knows how to manipulate these two men's submissive natures. 

It's a love triangle dynamic tackled in many other movies, mainly reminding me of the love triangle films of classic 1930s and 1940s cinema. However, Challengers's script does everything it can to elevate itself into being more than your basic love triangle narrative. The film uses an unconventional non-linear structure, jumping from the present to the past, all framed around one single game of tennis, which brilliantly reflects the events throughout the story, as these characters love, lust for and manipulate each other, which makes watching the events that unfold into a far more engaging experience than if the film told this story linearly. The film also spends its time with its characters, pacing its story in such a way that allows each character interaction to have its breathing room, allowing the film to flesh out these characters so that they feel like genuine, authentic people and less like generic pawns in a love triangle narrative. 

More than anything, though, what makes the film so fascinating is how it uses the sport at its center. Like all great sports movies, Challengers does an incredible job tying its story thematically to the sport at its center. The film understands the raw physicality and intimacy of tennis as a sport. So it brilliantly ties that around the film's narrative, already filled with moments of raw, muscular physicality and pure lustfulness and sensuality, making the film so fascinating. 

What also elevates the film is the filmmaking, which feels just as invigorating as the story. The film's editing and camerawork, as the film cuts or pans back and forth around characters during heated dialogue, complements a script with incredibly sharp dialogue, making for exhilarating dialogue sequences of characters arguing back and forth with each other like a tennis match. The film's tennis scenes take a sport I don't find all that interesting and transform it into a thrilling visual experience. The film uses unique visual choices where the camera glides up, through, and around the court and some visually impressive uses of shakey-cam, pov shots, and slow-mo to create heightened and visually dynamic tennis scenes. Out and inside the court, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's booming house and techno-inspired musical score reflect the film's heightened and intoxicating tone and feel. 

As well-paced as most of the film was, I felt it dragged a bit throughout the third act. It's clear the film does this to escalate the character conflicts to the absolute breaking point, and as thrilling as that is, it did begin to feel slightly cumbersome by the end. However, everything comes together in its final minutes, where the film releases all the pent-up energy throughout the movie through one exhilarating moment after another, using every dynamic camera and editing choice to get the heart and adrenaline pumping. 

Challengers takes such a captivating, complex love triangle narrative and uses top-notch filmmaking and pitch-perfect performances to make a film with such a rich, high-energy feel throughout its runtime. It's also a film with a pure sense of physicality and sensuality to it, which you don't see much in movies these days. It's a film that does everything it can, through its storytelling and filmmaking, to keep the viewer's attention high and their blood pumping.

*Now Showing in Theaters in the U.S.