Challengers

Wow. More than just the “hot threesome tennis film” that the trailers sold us, and what most will summarise as. Last week on Drewz Reviewz I spoke about Guadagnino’s penchant for exploring the human condition in all different types of contexts of his filmmaking (specifically Susperia) and Challengers just re-enforces that maxim and that sentiment two fold. Guadagnino gets love and wide spectrum of complexity it spans and once you mix that with actual pain, sorrow, ego and fragility you get a whole bag of complex results splayed out over a 2hr plus run time.  “I love you” is so two dimensional, “I love you and you love somebody else”, is broader, meatier - there’s more drama there but “I love you, I also love you but I’m not sure if you love me or HOW you love me, eventhough you probably don’t love anybody but yourself” is fucking stunning. All this small relationship drama unfolding against a tennis match nobody really wants to play but has to play is just genius.  Only Luca Guadagnino can take something so trivial and make it so compelling, so sexy, so intricately magnetising and so fucking good.