FILM
CHALLENGERS
GUADAGNINO SERVES UP AN ACE. PASS THE PIMM’S
Here: Love game: Art (Mike Faist), Tashi (Zendaya) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor).
★★★★★
OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 131 MINS
DIRECTOR Luca Guadagnino
CAST Josh O’Connor, Zendaya, Mike Faist
PLOT Meeting as teenagers, three ambitious tennis players embark on a journey of lust, love and ruinous competition. Game on.
SKIN GLIMMERS IN Challengers. Tongues entwine, sweat drips. Dicks dangle. Spit is spat. In faces.
Luca Guadagnino likes to get up close and personal. Of late he has blessed us with Call Me By Your Name’s juicy peach erotica, Bones And All’s ravenous finger-munching cannibalism and Suspiria’s, well, everything. But even by the director’s standards, Challengers is one tactile piece of work. Its cameras survey and worship the human body, its strength, its sexiness and its vulnerabilities, but it is supremely physical across the board, with bones crunched, tennis-balls pounded and racquets smashed to smithereens. Most destructive of all, though, are the brutal bouts of fuckery spilling out of the bedroom and onto the court, broken relationships broken further across the net. The tennis is violent. The hatred is delicious. The film is a lot.