Challengers is a technically brilliant film and a moral void. Luca Guadagnino is one of the most gifted visual stylists working today, and he brings his full arsenal to this story of a love triangle set across thirteen years of competitive tennis. The electronic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is propulsive and hypnotic. The cinematography is gorgeous. Zendaya delivers the best performance of her career. And yet the film exists in a complete ethical vacuum, presenting manipulation, infidelity, and sexual dominance as the sophisticated currency of desire.

The plot follows Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy whose injury ends her playing career. She becomes a coach instead, first marrying Art Donaldson and steering his rise to grand slam champion, all while maintaining a charged emotional entanglement with Patrick Zweig, Art's best friend and her own earlier boyfriend. The film is told nonlinearly, jumping back and forth across thirteen years with casual ease. The central question is not whether anyone will behave morally — they won't — but rather whose desire is more authentic, and what tennis itself means to each of them.

Guadagnino frames tennis explicitly as sex. The metaphor is not subtle. Rallies are intercut with romantic encounters. The serve is penetration. The return is response. When Tashi says she wants to watch some good f*ing tennis, she means it literally and figuratively. This is the film's central aesthetic strategy, and it's executed with skill. But it also means the film's moral universe is built entirely around physical desire, with nothing beyond it.

Tashi is the most compelling element and also the most concerning. She is brilliant, magnetic, and entirely willing to use the two men in her orbit as instruments of her ambitions. She cheats on Art. She strings Patrick along. She pushes Art toward a match he isn't sure he wants, against an opponent who is her unfinished emotional business. The film never condemns her for any of this. It finds her fascinating instead. For Guadagnino, Tashi is not a villain. She's a force of nature.

The male characters fare no better. Art is soft, compliant, increasingly hollow. Patrick is all appetite and no discipline. Neither man is able to function independently of Tashi's gravitational pull. The film's climax — a literal tennis match between the two men while Tashi watches — resolves in a moment of shared exhilaration that is deliberately ambiguous about what it means. Are these two men finally free of her? Are they playing for her? Are they playing for each other? Guadagnino refuses to answer, and that refusal is his aesthetic signature.

Conservative viewers will find little to celebrate here. The marriage between Art and Tashi is essentially a transaction — she coaches him, he provides stability, both get something from the arrangement that has almost nothing to do with love. Infidelity is treated as inevitable rather than tragic. The bisexual overtones (a three-way kiss early on, the male friendship that borders on romantic obsession) are presented as natural rather than transgressive. There are no children who are hurt by any of this, no consequences that feel genuinely painful. It's a sealed glass world where desire is everything and everything else is nothing.

The performances are uniformly excellent, which makes the moral emptiness all the more frustrating. Zendaya commands every scene. O'Connor brings wild-eyed charisma to Patrick. Faist is heartbreaking as a man hollowed out by success. These three actors deserve a film with a moral compass. They got an exquisite exercise in aesthetic nihilism instead.

For the technically inclined viewer, Challengers is fascinating. As a story that affirms anything worth affirming, it's a disappointment.

Trope	Category	Location	Authenticity
The Femme Fatale as Heroine	WOKE	Entire film — Tashi Duncan manipulates both male leads for her own ambitions without consequence or condemnation	The script is explicitly constructed around Tashi's power. This is not incidental. Guadagnino and Kuritzkes intentionally present her manipulation as sophisticated rather than destructive.
Infidelity Normalized	WOKE	Second act — Tashi has a one-night stand with Patrick while married to Art; treated as inevitable rather than tragic	Central to the plot. The infidelity is not resolved, repented, or punished within the film's moral framework.
Sexual Ambiguity as Sophistication	WOKE	First act hotel room scene — three-way kiss; Art and Patrick's friendship coded with romantic intensity throughout	Intentional Guadagnino signature. He does not frame bisexual or homoerotic tension as complicated — he presents it as natural and sophisticated.
Marriage as Transaction	WOKE	Throughout — Tashi and Art's relationship functions as a professional arrangement; love is secondary to competitive ambition	The script is explicit about this. Art himself acknowledges he is a project for Tashi. The transaction frame is never challenged.
Emasculated Male Characters	WOKE	Throughout — both Art and Patrick are defined entirely by their relationship to Tashi; neither has meaningful agency or identity outside her	Structural to the screenplay. The entire story is told from the perspective of Tashi's gravitational influence on two men who cannot escape it.
Competitive Excellence	TRADITIONAL	Tennis sequences throughout — all three characters demonstrate genuine dedication to athletic excellence; the match sequences are thrillingly rendered	Authentic. The film consulted real tennis professionals. The athletic sequences are based on real competitive dynamics.
Passion and Devotion	TRADITIONAL	Art and Patrick's devotion to Tashi across thirteen years — even when it costs them — carries a note of genuine romantic commitment	Partially authentic. The devotion is real within the film but is ultimately framed as pathological dependency rather than admirable love.
Industry and Perseverance	TRADITIONAL	Art's career arc — he becomes a grand slam champion through years of dedicated training under Tashi's coaching	Authentic. The film takes the work of athletic preparation seriously.