6 things to know before watching Zendaya’s new sports movie Challengers
At Polygon, a lot of us are fans of sitting down to a movie with as little upfront information as possible, for the feeling of discovery. But sometimes, it helps to know a few things going in, whether it’s an interesting fact about the movie’s history or just knowing how many end-credits scenes to wait for. Here are four things we think you should know about Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers before watching.
The simple title doesn’t offer much clarity. But broadly, and without spoilers: Challengers follows a complicated relationship between three people. Zendaya, who also produced the movie, plays Tashi, a former teenage tennis superstar. In a story that jumps back and forth in time, she meets best friends and tennis partners Art (West Side Story’s Mike Faist) and Patrick (The Crown’s Josh O’Connor), dates both of them, marries one of them and becomes his tennis coach, then pits them against each other in an epic tennis match for complicated personal reasons that take most of the movie to unpack.
The movie starts at that match, when all three of them are in their 30s. Then it loops back to their teen years, and jumps around in time to explore what happened between the threesome’s first meeting and the present, more than a decade later.
No, there’s nothing after the credits — meaning no further information about the aftermath of that final match. Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All) and writer Justin Kuritzkes leave that up to fanfiction writers. We like to think that aftermath resembles the climactic scene in one of Kuritzkes’ favorite movies, Y Tu Mamá También, which… well, if you know, you know.
The scoring rules for tennis are a little complicated, and it’s worth boning up on them before the movie if you want to fully understand the action and the specific setbacks and triumphs Art and Patrick face. (Video gamers who’ve played a lot of Wii Sports tennis or any of the many other tennis sims may be way ahead of the game here.)
The two men are
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