Challengers

I feel like someone took sports manga and steamy erotic thrillers and kept bumping them together making kissy noises. I wasn't expecting this to be my favourite movie of 2024 but here we are. I love the structure of going back and forth in time, and how the whole movie is built around this rematch between former friends Art and Patrick in a regional tennis final, and how the more of their shared history gets unveiled through the backstory, the more pressure, tension, and meaning is piled onto this match. By the final scene it's almost unbearable! Yes this movie is hot, and steamy, and erotically charged, but it's never explicit with it. The most graphic scenes, intentionally, are when they play tennis! I've grown up watching the sport, mostly through Wimbledon but I've dipped into the occasional US Open etc so I know my way around tennis, but I've never felt the intensity and drama like its depicted here - maybe the 'balls-eye view' shots are what did it, but I can see this igniting a love of the game for a fair few people after this... The three leads are really charismatic and their interactions are compelling. Luca Guadagnino is masterful in telling this story in a way that's complex and nuanced and never pandering to the audience. The final, dramatic reveal being tied to a callback from about halfway through the movie - and it doesn't flashback or explain it but just rely on you knowing - is superb. The plotting, the twists and turns, the backstabbing, betrayal, lust, heat, drama, layers and layers of innuendo and double meaning in every conversation, the meaningful glances, the outfits, the SOUNDTRACK - all of it figuratively and very literally fucks. Like seriously, I've been listening to the soundtrack on repeat while I down a Monster and I'm feeling like a god as I blast through this PowerPoint.