With some excellent lead performances and a standout soundtrack, Challengers is one of the best films of 2024.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the spicy sports drama follows professional tennis champion Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) who is plotting a career comeback with the help of his wife Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a former tennis rising star who was forced to retire due to an injury.
At a tournament, however, Art is matched against Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), who is his former best friend and his wife’s ex lover.
Along with starring in the film, Zendaya also serves as a producer alongside Guadagnino, Rachel O’Connor and Amy Pascal.
What happens at the end of Challengers?
The entirety of Challengers is told in a nonlinear fashion, as the love triangle between Art Donaldson, Tashi Duncan and Patrick Zweig is unraveled through flashbacks in the build-up to the climactic tennis match in the present.
A day prior to the match between Art and Patrick, Tashi tells her husband Art that if he loses the match, she will leave him – in what’s pitched as a motivator to spur him to win in order to get his tennis career back on track. Later on, Tashi meets with Patrick to ask him to throw the match in Art’s favour, and while he hesitantly agrees, the pair end up briefly rekindling their past romance and have sex in the back of a car.
At the match in the present, just as Patrick looks to throw the match by losing points with foul serves, he communicates to Art that he had sex with his wife the night prior by placing his tennis ball against the centre of his racket before his serve – something he did years prior when he first started dating Tashi. This sparks a furious reaction from Art, who starts playing tennis again with the kind of fire Tasha has tried to spark in him.
Art and Patrick engage in an intense volley back and forth, until the former leaps over the net and spikes the ball. Instead of trying to hit the ball back, Patrick catches Art as he nearly falls over the net and embraces him in a hug.
As the pair are seen smiling, Tashi lets out a huge scream from the stands, yelling, ‘Come on!’ – a sign that they are both back playing tennis to their full potential.
So we never know who wins?
Nope. As outlined by director Luca Guadagnino to Entertainment Weekly, the conclusion wasn’t about who won the match, or who won Tashi’s affections, but the fight to bring back the “burgeoning desires” they all felt for each other years ago. Only this time, it had now translated to the court.
“I needed to get this very, very visually amped up and really immersed for the audience to understand how much it meant for them not to win over the other, but to be back together, all of them,” Guadagnino said.