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Fall review – wildly effective survival thriller delivers seat-edge suspense

Two young women are trapped on top of a 2,000ft tower in an absolutely absurd yet undeniably effective nightmare

P re-release debates over the title of Jordan Peele’s patchy summer hit Nope were settled last month when the secretive writer-director revealed that no, it wasn’t an acronym for “not of planet earth” but was something far more simple. It was, as others had expected, a nod to what many audiences are accustomed to wearily shouting at the screen during a horror film. Investigate that unsettling sound coming from a barely lit basement in a remote house late at night? Nope! Accept a lift from a creepy stranger in a blood-spattered pick-up truck? Nope! Climb up an ancient and abandoned 2,000ft TV tower without support, food or alerting anyone else first? Nope!

With the release of ridiculous yet undeniably rattling new thriller Fall, it’ll be heard on a loop from cinemagoers across the US this weekend, said first with an eye-roll before being screamed through sweat-drenched fingers. Hinged on a setup so stupid that it takes some strength to make it through the first 15 minutes without checking out, the buzz-free August surprise manages to erase all early doubt with enough genuine seat-edge suspense to turn it into the most exciting and effectively agonising action movie of the summer. I found it hard not to quietly cheer while watching this tiny-budgeted underdog swoop in and climb its way to the top of the tower; Mavericks, Thors and Grey Men falling away with speed.

In a sub-Cliffhanger cold open, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) suffers a devastating loss when her husband Dan (Mason Gooding) falls to his death in a climbing accident leaving her and best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner) to pick up the pieces. A year later, Becky is drowning her sorrows when Hunter, now a successful YouTuber specialising in extreme stunts, calls, saving her from the brink. The estranged pair reunite when Hunter suggests she join her on an audacious climb to the top of a 2,000ft tower in the middle of the desert. Spurred on by a vague idea of confronting fear, she says yes. But when they reach the very top, disaster strikes, the ladder falls away and they’re left stranded.

It’s all head-shakingly ridiculous and while the script isn’t equipped to find a believable justification as to why someone trying to get over such horrific trauma would want to do something quite so deranged, none of that really matters once we’re halfway up (a point that we’re chillingly reminded is the height of the Eiffel Tower). While the dodgy green screen in the cold open had me worried, despite an astonishingly low $3m budget, British director Scott Mann manages to make the high-in-the-sky danger feel scarily, stomach-churningly real and if the pace allowed for it, it’d be tempting to Google just how on earth they managed it all while watching. Despite obvious VFX work (even Tom Cruise would turn down such a stunt), the joins are so hard to spot and the illusion so skillfully conjured that I found myself utterly, horribly immersed in the big dumb spectacle of it all. Spanish cinematographer MacGregor and an A-game visual effects team use the structure’s perspective to breath-taking, dizzyingly queasy effect and even find time for some rather stunning standalone images, briefly transforming a B-movie into something oddly artful.

Stupidity might have got the pair up to the top but their actions once situated are grounded and satisfyingly competent, Mann and co-writer Jonathan Frank finding an impressive amount of mileage from two people stuck on a small grate with a small bag. It’s a puzzle for them to solve and like the very best survival movies, it has us trying to solve it alongside, could that or would that or how about questions tidily fitting in-between the steady stream of nopes. There are two silly, derivative twists, the first incredibly easy to spot and the second incredibly easy to get annoyed with, but it’s mostly a pretty straightforward against-the-odds thriller, a throwback of sorts with some slight nu-tech tweaks (who knew a selfie stick could be such a vital emergency tool?). The tension of it all is heightened even moreso by two fully committed performances from little-known actors giving it their all, trying admirably hard to sell some laughably goofy dialogue during a physically gruelling vertical obstacle course (Gardner emerges as the real standout, possessing the effervescence of a young Reese Witherspoon).

Fall is the rare three-drinks-in “what if?” elevator pitch that somehow survived the journey to the big screen, made with unusual precision and punch. Director Mann sets his sights low even as his simple, sturdy film climbs so very, very high and in doing so, delivers in a way that so few have this year, a $3m embarrassment to the studios throwing a hundred times more at blockbusters with a hundred times less of a thrill factor. Arriving in the dog days of summer, it’s something of a marvel.

Fall is out in US cinemas on 12 August and in the UK on 2 September

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A Movie So Ideal for the End of Summer That It’s Actually Called Fall

August has always been a wasteland, the Sunday night of months, when the weather is at its sticky worst and everybody who has the ability to fuck off to someplace more pleasant has already done so. If you don’t have the means, there’s the cheaper sanctuary of the cineplex, with its welcoming darkness and arctic air-conditioning — except that after a summer in which theatrical releases mounted a rousing comeback , the studios neglected to schedule any big movies for this period in which we most need something dumb and fun. Fortunately, there’s a not-that-big movie that fits the bill of being silly and simple enough to fill a lazy afternoon without demanding anything strenuous from its audience at all. That movie is Fall , in which two young women climb up to the top of a remote TV tower for the sake of closure — and also content — and then get stuck up there.

Fall is part of that grand cinematic tradition in which attractive actors get trapped somewhere dangerous and have to struggle to save themselves, hopefully for at least the 80 minutes required for an acceptable feature-length. Recent-ish participants include Ryan Reynolds, who in a lull in his career back in 2010 spent the entirety of Buried in a wooden coffin; his spouse Blake Lively, who was trapped on a rock in the ocean by a persistent shark in the improbably good in 2016’s The Shallows ; and Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore, and Kevin Zegers, who got marooned on a ski lift suspended over some convenient wolves in 2010’s Frozen . Like those movies, what Fall offers is a double layer of tension. Will Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) figure out a way to make it off a 2,000-foot TV tower unscathed? And will writer-director Scott Mann figure out a way to draw out the suspense for long enough when there are only so many things that can happen on top of a 2,000-foot TV tower and one of them is in the title?

Does it really matter? I’m tired. Tapped out. I have no means for a vacation at the moment and nothing else left to give to this season, and Fall asks for so little that it feels like too much to demand something as basic as logic or characters in return. See, Becky’s husband Dan (Mason Gooding) died during a rock-climbing excursion the two of them were taking with Hunter, and a year later, Becky’s still mourning — you can tell by the fact that she drinks alone at bars. Then Hunter, her internet-famous bestie, shows up with a proposal that will help Becky get her mojo back: They’re going to climb the decommissioned B67 TV tower out in the California desert. Becky is a sad brunette and Hunter is a fun blonde, and that’s about all there is to the two, despite a brief gesture toward an extreme-sports frenemies dynamic right out of The Descent . Braving the height looks like the bigger challenge at first — there’s a ladder up the side of the tower, so it doesn’t require Spider-Man-like free-climbing skills. But then the ladder, rusted and neglected, sheers off, leaving the two women trapped on a narrow platform high above the earth.

There’s blistering sun, and an attempt to get help with a flare gun, and when things get really desperate, some marauding vultures. Mann and his crew built a version of the tower close to a cliff to give his shots a real sense of dizzying height and a more tangible sense of danger. An incredibly weak twist pays off with a hilariously gruesome, triumphant finale. But what really makes Becky and Hunter’s little saga so seasonally appropriate is that it feels like a consolation for those of us feeling a little stuck ourselves. These two daring, adventure-seeking women head off for what’s supposed to be a fun getaway that tests their limits and restores their sense of self, and what happens? They get stranded, sunburnt and dehydrated, unable to get a phone signal or anyone’s attention as scavengers try to eat them. Sure, the vertiginous shots up the side of the tower are stomach-turning, but what’s really satisfying is the message that sometimes it’s better just to stay home. It’s Fall , get it? Summer is over.

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Scott Mann ’s “Fall” belongs to the trapped horror subgenre of films like “ The Shallows ” and “ Open Water ,” but it takes a dynamic that usually unfolds in the middle of deep water to thousands of feet in the air. Mann and co-writer Jonathan Frank have a clever concept that results in a film that should be avoided by anyone with even the mildest vertigo—I wouldn’t say I’m particularly afraid of heights but there are some scenes that made my stomach turn a bit. You’ve been warned. Sadly, the concept only takes “Fall” so high, and the execution, including some ineffective acting, editing, and other technical choices, makes this a misfire. It doesn’t exactly crash to Earth as much as drift off into the forgettable air of film history.

Becky ( Grace Caroline Currey ), husband Dan ( Mason Gooding ), and Becky’s BFF Hunter ( Virginia Gardner ) are climbing a sheer mountain face in the opening scene when tragedy strikes and Dan plummets to the ground below. A year later, Becky is drowning her grief in a bottle, avoiding Hunter and her worried father James ( Jeffrey Dean Morgan , taking a part so small that it's like a favor to a friend). One day, Insta-star Hunter comes to Becky with a proposal: They’re going to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower that’s basically in the middle of nowhere, from which they will find closure and spread Dan’s ashes. Of course, it goes very wrong, leaving Becky and Hunter stranded on top of the tower with no way down and no way to communicate with anyone who might be able to save them.

Filmed in the Mojave Desert, the vast majority of “Fall” takes place on the tower, and the film admittedly gets some nice adrenaline from the initial climb and disastrous ladder collapse that follows. In fact, there’s a better version of the film that starts right with the climb, allowing the characters’ trauma to arise through their conversations on the way up instead of with a horrendous set-up act that’s filled with clichés and poor filmmaking (it also would have helped reduce the runtime on a 107-minute movie that should be closer to 87). When Becky and Hunter begin their actual ascent, Mann has his firmest grip on the movie, building tension in a way that can be pretty effective.

And then “Fall” stalls again. Hunter is given a secret that's more like melodrama than realism, vultures and drones get involved, and the movie gets increasingly silly through its final act. The best “trapped” films usually rely on realism, making viewers feel like they’re actually trapped in the rocky waves of a film like “Open Water,” and “Fall” crumbles under that analysis. Currey and Gardner give committed performances in physical terms—it looks like an exhausting production—but they’re saddled with juvenile dialogue that doesn’t capture the terror people would really feel in this situation. “Fall” only works if we believe the predicament in which Becky and Hunter are trapped, but the thin dialogue, showy cinematography, and overzealous edits betray the potential of this nightmare.

Ultimately, “Fall” has been designed to be seen on as a big a screen as possible, which is why Lionsgate is going wide with it this weekend instead of shuffling it off to VOD. Much has been written about getting ticket buyers back into theaters with event movies that demand the theatrical experience. It's too bad this effort to help keep the theater industry aloft will only let viewers down.

Now playing in theaters.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Fall (2022)

Rated PG-13 for bloody images, intense peril, and strong language.

107 minutes

Virginia Gardner as Hunter

Grace Caroline Currey as Becky

Jonathan Frank

Cinematographer

Robert Hall

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Rent Fall on Fandango at Home, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Apple TV.

What to Know

Fundamentally absurd yet as evocatively minimalist as its title, Fall is a sustained adrenaline rush for viewers willing to suspend disbelief.

As long as you don't go in expecting anything realistic, Fall is a solidly suspenseful B-movie done right.

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Grace Caroline Currey

Virginia Gardner

Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Mason Gooding

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‘Fall’ Film Review: Heights-Driven Thriller Successfully Maintains Its Grip

This suspended-suspenser plays to audience acrophobia

Like a provisions-packed knapsack, a good deal of emotional backstory gets shoved into the first half-hour of “Fall” before it traps two female climbers 2,000 feet above the ground in a remote stretch of desert for the rest of its running time.

Will that friendship be tested? Of course. But the true signal that co-writer (with Jonathan Frank) and director Scott Mann has his thrill-hungry audience’s needs in mind is that before adventuring besties Becky and Hunter can even get to the base of the TV tower they intend to scale, they lock eyes with a carcass-gnawing vulture, who gets a righteously gnarly, ominous close-up.

In other words, you’re in good talons with “Fall,” a better-than-average B-movie corker that’s almost like a corrective these days to the behemoths that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on mayhem only to bludgeon us with exhilaration-free, numbingly digitized peril. If you long for the sweaty-palmed giggling inspired by Harold Lloyd hanging off a high-rise’s clockface or Tom Cruise on the harness-necessitating side of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, you will likely fall for “Fall.”

Cruise’s “Mission Impossible” character Ethan Hunt even gets a shout-out in Mann’s and co-screenwriter Jonathan Frank’s screenplay, invoked as an adrenaline god by daredevil vlogger Hunter (Virginia Gardner, “Runaways”), on a mission to snap her pal Becky (Grace Caroline Currey, “Shazam!”) out of a yearlong bereavement following the death of Becky’s husband Dan (Mason Gooding).

The movie’s “Free Solo”–esque prologue, set on a sheer mountain face, depicts that ill-fated climbing accident, witnessed by the two women. Twelve months later, Becky has curled inward into the drinking, crying, suicidal life of a shut-in, ignoring the emotional pleas of her worried dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), until bouncy, sassy Hunter shows up at her door with her version of a self-help scheme: Secretly ascending a disused TV tower for the one-year anniversary of Dan’s death, Becky will then be able to get past her grief, while Hunter, armed with a drone and a selfie stick, gets to create a lot of sexy-dangerous YouTube content.

The screenplay is chockful of platitudes about facing death, living life, confronting fear, moving on, letting go, blah blah blah, but that dialogue matters less than whether Currey and Gardner are a believable Gen-Z team of self-gratification junkies looking like they’re having fun doing something crazily reckless. From that angle, the duo’s energetic performances suffice, carrying an authentically warm and teasing camaraderie into the California desert, past that No Trespassing sign, up hundreds of rusted rungs, and onto a tiny circular platform that threatens to become the site of Becky’s and Hunter’s last selfie when the tower’s uppermost ladder separates from its loose bolts and strands them.

Mann’s previous hackwork in the grizzled-male action genre (“The Heist,” “Final Score”) won’t prepare you for how dedicated he is to avoiding scared-damsel vibes and centering instead the pair’s fearlessness and smarts. (Panic isn’t absent, mind you, just saved for when appropriate.) “Fall” can then focus on maximizing its one-location two-hander, toggling between what’s outlandishly fun about enduring this particular hazard (which is based on a real TV tower, one of the highest structures in the US) and what’s believably clever in the details of how Becky and Hunter try to save themselves.

On the characterization front, things can get clunky — one revelation is eye-rollingly predictable, and a third-act twist feels cribbed from a lot of unreliable-narrator movies. But viscerally the movie delivers — the site-specific peril is suitably unnerving when the stuntwork, effects, and cinematographer MacGregor’s more height-intensified shots are in synch, and the rescue hacks these tech-savvy women devise from their available items (phones, binoculars, shoes, drone, selfie stick, tower light, push-up bra) are enjoyably crafty enough to earn the movie’s one self-satisfied bit of dialogue: “That’s some MacGyver shit.”

And don’t forget those feathered harbingers of doom. This may be the first movie to apply the Chekhov’s gun rule to vultures, a portent sure to satisfy the more horror-minded ticket buyers, not to mention anyone else eager for the kind of back-to-basics survival excitement “Fall” refreshingly serves up in this dreary age of apocalyptic popcorn emptiness.

“Fall” opens in US theaters August 12.

Fall hits some exhilarating B-movie heights

Like a viral video you can't stop watching, scott mann's film about stranded thrill-seekers mesmerizes even as it tests believability.

(from left) Grace Caroline Currey as Becky and Virginia Gardner as Hunter in Fall.

You’ve seen those videos on social media. Click-driven lunatics dangling off the side of cliffs, sticking their tongues out at the camera, ripping a big “whoooooo!” You grimace, maybe even groan, then share it yourself with a proper “oh, hell no!”

Movie Review – Fall (2022)

November 14, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Fall , 2022.

Directed by Scott Mann. Starring Virginia Gardner, Grace Caroline Currey, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Mason Gooding.

Best friends Becky and Hunter find themselves at the top of a 2,000-foot radio tower.

Director Scott Mann (also co-writing alongside Jonathan Frank) practically backs himself into a corner with Fall , leaving it difficult to care whether the protagonists in peril atop a 2,000-foot radio tower live or die by the time they start scaling it.

A simple setup goes on for roughly 30 minutes, establishing characters as various degrees of annoying, unlikable, or flat-out dumb (if such a subgenre exists of idiotic thrillseeking white women willingly placing themselves into danger that we are somehow supposed to care about, you can drop Fall right in there).

Becky’s (Grace Caroline Currey) life is a mess one year after a tragic mountain climbing accident that saw the death of her husband Dan (Mason Gooding). She appears to be an alcoholic with no direction, and her father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) worries about her. However, he says horrible things about Becky’s late husband to prove his point that she needs to stop wasting time morning him. He means well and is looking out for his daughter, but the dialogue doesn’t exactly paint him as a positive force in Becky’s life.

To be fair, dad realizes he has an unproductive approach toward reaching his distant daughter. As such, he convinces Becky’s best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who was also there the day Dan fell to his death in a freak accident, to check up on her and to do something together to put her in a more healthy state of mind hopefully. It’s also apparent that Becky and Hunter haven’t spoken much since the tragedy. Hunter suggests climbing a massive radio tower (almost twice as tall as the Eiffel tower) and spreading Dan’s ashes. Cue the themes about confronting trauma and living life to the fullest (which involves a death wish for some people).

At first, Fall feels like it’s trying to be a parody of the frustrating stupidity I keep bringing up. Not only do Becky and Hunter (especially the latter) come across as dolts (who in the hell would climb a random tower that no one knows is even safe to do so, and more importantly, has parts constantly creaking the further they go up), but there’s also a social media angle as Hunter has a sizable following from her climbing and encouraging people to find a crazy activity that makes them feel alive. The message behind it is also smartly laid out without beating it over anyone’s head.

While Fall boasts a clever concept, most of its moves and plot reveals are telegraphed stolen clichés from nearly every other type of survivalist movie (including the one that should be banned from all future scripts unless it’s legitimately well executed). Fortunately, Becky and Hunter display resourcefulness and resiliency once stranded, turning them into characters worth rooting for.

The performances from Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner reflect this, as they give convincing physical performances despite the unconvincing green screen background. The downside is that they are given some weak dialogue involving an utterly unnecessary plot twist (one that can also be seen coming from a mile away, provided the viewer is paying attention). Thankfully, the script doesn’t spend too much time on it, but it does show that the filmmakers are straining for things to give these characters to do while stuck atop the tower.

What’s confounding is that with a running time of approximately 110 minutes, Fall does have the choice to cut some of this out. There are also clever ideas that play off of being stranded 2,000 feet in the air and what to do to get themselves rescued. It involves technology, not in the way one might assume, but not enough to open up a discussion on what works and doesn’t. There’s at least one decent fake-out moment of potentially being rescued, vultures circle the area at night, and some of the climbing, dropping, roping, and swinging make for thrilling acrobatic maneuvers. 1

A version of Fall that trims the first act bloat and cliché plot twists would probably play with tighter pacing and more intensity. As is, those issues are the film’s unrecoverable downfall.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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‘Humane’ Review: Caitlin Cronenberg’s First Feature Is a Searing Domestic Thriller About Crimes of the Not-So-Distant Future

In a society where state euthanasia has become the answer to climate change, four furious siblings have two hours to decide which one will die.

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From this degraded-future premise, you might expect to see a movie full of swirling crowds of people in chaos. But “Humane” is about one family, and it’s set almost entirely inside a mansion — a veritable castle of a home, built out of 18th-century brick, with a turret and a five-story tower. It looks like the sort of place where the Munsters could live, but in fact it’s occupied by Charles York ( Peter Gallagher ), a retired celebrity newscaster in the Peter Jennings/Dan Rather stentorian liberal mode, and his second wife, Dawn (Uni Park), a venerable Japanese chef.

Charles seems like a decent enough guy, but he’s full of himself. That’s why his adult children don’t trust him. He has summoned all four of them to meet for a dinner party: Jared (Jay Baruchel), a divorced weasel of a professor who goes on TV to be a bureaucratic cheerleader for the enlistment program; Rachel (Emily Hampshire), a seething corporate snake; Ashley (Allana Bale), an aspiring actress whose career has turned out to be nothing, leaving her miserable; and Noah (Sebastian), Charles’s adopted son, a bohemian nervous wreck who’s a piano prodigy and also a recovering addict who killed someone in a car accident (he’s got a prominent scar on his cheek). This is a brood so angry and lost that Eugene O’Neill might tell them to lighten up. But Cronenberg turns out to be a terrific director of actors, and we’re held by the toxic theatrical juiciness of the sibling rivalry.

Why a dinner party? Charles is using it to announce to his children that he has enlisted. He plans to die by euthanasia — that very night — and wants to bid everyone goodbye. (His wife is sacrificing herself too.) This is Charles’ way of leaving a legacy, of dying in a way that will make everyone think well of him. So there’s more than a little family resentment about it. Before long, men in white jumpsuits show up from D.O.C.S. (the Department of Citizen Strategy), the corporate entity the government has put in charge of euthanizing people. The squad leader, Bob (Enrico Colantoni), looks like a guy you’d see in a bowling alley, but he’s a bit of a creep, with a penchant for jaunty gallows humor. He administers the lethal injection to Charles in a peaceful enough fashion. But Dawn, Charles’s wife? She has vanished. Which leads to the real problem: Since the two of them signed an enlistment contract, someone from the York family — one of the four children — is going to have to volunteer to be euthanized in her place. They’ve got two hours to decide who it’s going to be.

Cronenberg treats the mansion as an enormous stage set, turning “Humane” into a kind of psychodramatic slasher movie. You could say that one of the film’s themes is privilege. The characters, as the children of a famous newscaster, thought they were exempt from self-sacrifice. But it turns out that a situation this ruthless is coming for everybody. Yet the film’s real theme is that a bureaucracy that’s too corrupt to solve essential problems (like climate change) will end up shredding the social fabric. Because underneath it all, that’s what it mostly knows how to do.

Reviewed online, April 25, 2024. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 93 MIN.

Production: An IFC Films Shudder release, in association with Elevation Pictures, of a Victory Man, Prospero Pictures, Telefilm Canada, Ontario Creates production, in association with Red Jar Capital, XYZ Films, Crave. Producers: Michael Sparaga, Todd Brown, Nick Spicer, Adrian Love, Laurie May, Scott Shooman, Emily Gotto, Martin Katz, Karen Wookey.
Crew: Director: Caitlin Cronenberg. Screenplay: Michael Sparaga. Camera: Douglas (Doug) Koch. Editor: Orlee Buium.
With: Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Peter Gallagher, Enrico Colantoni, Sebastian Chacon, Alanna Bale, Sirena Gulamgaus.

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The best movies of 2024 so far, according to critics

‘perfect days,’ ‘sasquatch sunset,’ ‘love lies bleeding’ and ‘civil war’ all make our evolving list of 2024’s best films.

When it comes to movies, why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists? A number of movies have already garnered three stars or more from The Washington Post’s critics and contributors (Ann Hornaday, Ty Burr, Amy Nicholson, Jen Yamato, Jessica Kiang, Michael O’Sullivan, Mark Jenkins and Michael Brodeur — identified by their initials below).

Throughout the year, we’ll update this list — bookmark it! — with the films that we loved and where to watch them. (Note that all movies reviewed by The Post in 2024 are eligible for inclusion.)

Writer-director Alex Garland doesn’t investigate how this war started or how long it’s been going on or whether it’s worth fighting. His lean, cruel film is about the ethics of photographing violence, and those blinders make it charge forward with gusto. The film feels poetically, deeply true, even when it’s suggesting that humans are more apt to tear one another apart for petty grievances than over a sincere defense of some kind of principles. Starring Kristen Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. (R, 109 minutes) — Amy Nicholson

Where to watch: In theaters

Challengers

A slick, sexy, hugely entertaining, tennis-themed romantic triangle that offers three young performers at the top of their games under the guidance of Luca Guadagnino, a director who gives them room to swing in all senses of the word. The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this. Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor play rising tennis stars; Zendaya is their coach, holding down the center with her furiously knitted brow. (R, 131 minutes) — Ty Burr

Wicked Little Letters

An art-house audience pleaser , based on an actual historical incident, that slaps a veneer of tea-cozy classiness over cartoonish characters and changing social values. In a dingy English seaside town in 1920, someone has been sending anonymous poison-pen letters to church lady Edith (Olivia Colman) — written in language so obscene that it’s practically an art form — and suspicion quickly falls on the foul-mouthed Rose (Jessie Buckley), a single mother freshly arrived from Ireland. The movie is good fun and surprisingly obvious — a slapstick comedy of manners that only hints at darker human urges. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B.

Sasquatch Sunset

Either the silliest movie you’ll see in 2024 or one of the most unexpectedly affecting, but, like the meme says, why not both ? A year in the life of a family of Bigfoots — Bigfeet? — it functions simultaneously as slow-motion slapstick, a very hairy nature documentary and a melancholy portrait of creatures not unlike us as they confront their own disappearance from the Earth. With no narration and no dialogue beside grunts, hoots and warbles, the movie effectively puts an audience on the same (big) footing as the characters. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Nathan Zellner. (R, 89 minutes) — T.B.

Two-time Oscar winner Ennio Morricone , who died in 202o at the age of 91, was a composer and arranger of music that helped define what it sounds like to go to the movies. Now, director Giuseppe Tornatore — who worked with Morricone for nearly all his films, including 1988’s “Cinema Paradiso” — turns an overdue spotlight on the composer behind the legendary scores of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Thing” and more than 500 others. At nearly three hours, “Ennio” is a long haul, exhaustive without ever becoming exhausting. Though it could definitely survive edits, its length feels like the product of genuine ardor and care. (Unrated, 156 minutes) — Michael Brodeur

Where to watch: In theaters and on demand

The People’s Joker

Hollywood’s superhero blockbuster business has grown creatively stale, but Vera Drew’s irreverent renegade opus is just the antidote the genre desperately needs. Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale in which Drew stars as Joker, a closeted trans woman and aspiring comedian who leaves her Smallville hometown for a dystopian Gotham City. Her film is the cinematic coup of the year, finally delivering the boundary-obliterating antiheroine Hollywood deserves. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — Jen Yamato

The Iranian French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi has the eyes of a silent film heroine and the face of a Modigliani. In repose, she can convey a sense of sorrow that feels both elegant and timeless, but in “ Shayda ,” that stillness is fraught with specific threat: the anguish of a woman fleeing an abusive husband. Made with a striking sensitivity to mood and moment, the film marks a strong debut for Iranian Australian writer-director Noora Niasari, who mines her own experience and that of her mother for a gripping yet tender suspense drama. (PG-13, 117 minutes) — T.B.

Antiquity and the modern day sit side by side in the films of Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher, permeating each other with the timelessness of a folk tale passed around a campfire. The writer-director’s latest concerns a raffish band of working-class tombaroli — grave robbers — who dig up ancient Etruscan artifacts and sell them on the black market, but the movie’s also a meditation on the tension between romanticizing the past and profiting from it. Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer. (Unrated, 132 minutes) — T.B.

Where to watch: Not yet streaming

Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass’s gorgeously pulpy film is a grisly delirium of female rage and romance in which queerness is neither a liability nor a simple fact of life that deserves respect: It’s a goddamn superpower. Kristen Stewart, in a skeevy mullet and a sleeveless tee, plays a gym manager who falls in crazy, scuzzy love with a bodybuilding drifter (Katy O’Brian). There are pyrotechnics and sucked toes and a jaw beaten clean off a skull. In terms of graphic gore, the head-stomping scene in “American History X” and the corpse-splitting moment in “Bone Tomahawk” need to scooch over on the podium. (R, 104 minutes) — Jessica Kiang

Where to watch: In theaters, available for streaming later this year on Max

They Shot the Piano Player

Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (“Belle Époque”) and artist/co-director Javier Mariscal celebrate the spirit of Brazilian bossa nova and the ghosts of artists who live on only in recordings and archival interviews. But this animated documentary ’s central ghost remains touchingly and frustratingly unknowable: Francisco Tenório Júnior, a gifted pianist, considered by his peers as one of the best of their generation, who disappeared in 1976 while on tour in Argentina. “They Shot the Piano Player” doesn’t unravel a mystery so much as confirm a tragedy. (PG-13, 103 minutes) — T.B.

Four Daughters

Film as family therapy and family therapy as film. This gripping and format-stretching documentary by writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania brings actors into the household of a Tunisian mother named Olfa and her two youngest daughters, both teenagers. The three women play themselves alongside two professional actors filling in for the girls’ two missing siblings — what happened to them will unfurl, one twist at a time. (Unrated, 110 minutes) — A.N.

Where to watch: Netflix

Perfect Days

The premise is perfectly simple: Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) lives in Tokyo, where he cleans bathrooms, approaching his job with the same care and detail he gives to the tree seedlings he’s nurturing in his modest, sparsely furnished apartment. The fact that writer-director Wim Wenders has called a movie about cleaning toilets “Perfect Days” might strike some viewers as the height of absurdity, even perverse humor (the film bears more than a whiff of Jim Jarmusch at his most wryly absurdist). But once they get a glimpse of Hirayama in action, the dreams behind the drudgery reveal themselves. (PG, 123 minutes) — Ann Hornaday

Where to watch: On demand

Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet from Stardom”), this documentary take on comic Steve Martin is broken into two feature-length installments, titled “Then” (94 minutes) and “Now” (97 minutes). The first and lesser half is pretty standard stuff, covering in enjoyable but repetitive detail the period of Martin’s gradual stand-up ascendancy to selling out stadiums. The much more engaging “Now” dips in and out of Martin’s movie career, includes interviews (Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Lorne Michaels) and delivers candid moments with Martin’s bestie, Martin Short. (TV-MA, 191 minutes in two parts) — J.K.

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s quietly shattering, Oscar-winning portrait of a family living next door to Auschwitz is really two movies in one: the film that audiences see on-screen — a bucolic domestic drama, filled with children, gardens and daily rituals — and the movie we conjure in our minds, with images of emaciated bodies, shaved heads and screams barely audible above the clinking teacups and cooing babies. Adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, the film is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless. (PG-13, 106 minutes) — A.H.

Where to watch: Max

Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed. (PG-13, 135 minutes) — A.H.

The Taste of Things

A radiant Juliette Binoche plays Eugénie, a gifted cook who for the past 20 years has been running the kitchen of a 19th-century epicurean named Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). No one breaks a sweat in “ The Taste of Things ” — they glow. No one swears or yells “Corner!” or “Yes, chef!” — they whisper, or simply deliver an approving glance of gustatory satisfaction. This is the anti-“Bear,” a sensuous fantasia of gastronomical pleasure less redolent of the Beef than “Babette’s Feast.” (PG-13, 134 minutes) — A.H.

Born two months before the Nazis surrendered, celebrated German artist Anselm Kiefer grew up amid his homeland’s rubble. Destruction still compels and even delights him, as Wim Wenders demonstrates in his epic 3D documentary. The colossal spaces Kiefer inhabits and transforms are ideal for Wenders’s approach, which conveys the physicality of the artist’s work and places the viewer virtually within the maelstrom of creation. It’s a fascinating, if somewhat unnerving, place to be. (Unrated, 93 minutes) — Mark Jenkins

How to Have Sex

The title of this promising writing-directing debut from Molly Manning Walker is something of a misdirect. Her startlingly intimate portrait of teenage girls in search of the endless party while on summer holiday in Greece is more accurately described as a tutorial in how not to have sex, i.e., when you’re young, inebriated, feeling pressured or vulnerable to manipulation. In its frankness and often frightening candor, it’s of a piece with coming-of-age dramas like “Thirteen” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” with a dash of “Spring Breakers.” (Unrated, 90 minutes) — A.H.

Io Capitano

Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated, migrant-themed drama fashions a hero’s journey that feels utterly of the moment: inspired by the true stories of African immigrants , but told in a way that features episodes of both harrowing verisimilitude and hallucinatory magic realism. It’s a film that is gorgeous at times yet also tough to watch. (Unrated, 121 minutes) — Michael O’Sullivan

The Teachers’ Lounge

Despite the title of Germany’s Oscar submission , the primary setting is a sixth-grade classroom, where things have gone missing lately. As school officials attempt to get to the bottom of the thefts, that classroom becomes a mirror of the outside world, with all its diversity, divisions and discontents. The film is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias. Its larger message is also one worth hearing, if not exactly news: In an age of cancel culture, the classroom is a battlefield. (PG-13, 98 minutes) — M.O.

Sometimes I Think About Dying

As subdued in tone and emotion as the neutral beige and brown ensembles favored by its mousy, office-worker protagonist (Daisy Ridley), this film offers an unconventional love story : one less about the thrill of romance than about the terror — and ultimate release — of connection. Director Rachel Lambert delivers its story with a reserve that is made up for by a genuinely affecting tenderness for its flawed yet searching characters. It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell. (PG-13, 91 minutes) — M.O.

The Monk and the Gun

This sweet, off-kilter comedy offers a sly satire of today’s polarized world. Written and directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji, and focusing on Bhutan’s preparations for the democratic elections first held in 2008, it shares the same wry spirit and gentle tension between tradition and modernity that characterized the Bhutanese-born, American-trained filmmaker’s heartwarming Oscar-nominated 2019 film, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” but with some added bite. (PG-13, 112 minutes) — M.O.

This rebooted hybrid of the hit 2004 movie “ Mean Girls ” and the Broadway stage musical it spawned wisely doesn’t try to simply adapt for the screen something that worked onstage and wouldn’t translate to film. Yes, it’s got songs (by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin), but they feel abridged and ever so slightly diminished, delivered more in the context of the original narrative of viral shaming, which has been tweaked for our TikTok times. The remake is sharp, well-acted and funny, and there are a few surprises for “Mean Girls” cultists. (PG-13, 105 minutes) — M.O.

Where to watch: Paramount Plus

A previous version of this article misidentified one of the actors in "Challengers." That actor's name is Josh O’Connor. The article has been corrected.

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Cast & crew
User reviews

Challengers

Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, turned her husband into a champion. But to overcome a losing streak, he needs to face his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, turned her husband into a champion. But to overcome a losing streak, he needs to face his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, turned her husband into a champion. But to overcome a losing streak, he needs to face his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend.

Luca Guadagnino
Justin Kuritzkes
Josh O'Connor
130 User reviews
151 Critic reviews
83 Metascore
1 nomination

Tashi Donaldson

Art Donaldson

Patrick Zweig
Umpire (New Rochelle Final)

Art's Physiotherapist

Art's Security Guard
(as a different name)
Tashi's Mother
Line Judge (New Rochelle Final)
TV Sports Commentator (Atlanta 2019)

Leo Du Marier

Woman With Headset (Atlanta 2019)

Motel Front Desk Clerk
Motel Husband

New Rochelle Parking Lot Guard
USTA Official …
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Taking On 'Challengers'

Did you know

Trivia To prepare for her role, Zendaya spent three months with pro tennis player-turned-coach, Brad Gilbert .
Goofs After Patrick loses the second set in his final round match against Art and smashes his racquet, the chair umpire declares a code violation point penalty, however it should have been a game penalty as Patrick had already received a point penalty earlier in the match (the scoreboard at the bottom accurately reflects the correct score)

Tashi Donaldson : I'm taking such good care of my little white boys.

Connections Featured in The Project: Episode dated 26 March 2024 (2024)
Soundtracks Time Will Crawl Written and performed by David Bowie

User reviews 130

magadalwarmayur
Apr 25, 2024
When was Challengers released? Powered by Alexa
April 26, 2024 (United States)
United States
Official Site
Những Kẻ Thách Đấu
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Frenesy Film Company
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Pascal Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$55,000,000 (estimated)
$15,011,061
Apr 28, 2024
$25,311,061

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 11 minutes
Dolby Digital
Dolby Atmos

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On ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor

Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.

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A black-and-white close-up of a woman with light hair tilting her head and bringing one hand to her face.

By Lindsay Zoladz

If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.

Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.

What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.

Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.

Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”

At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track , on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth ?! — is strangely humanizing.

Taylor Swift’s New Album Reviewed

For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. ( Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.

As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!

That song , though, is one of the album’s best — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of fresh air and allows Swift to harness a more theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “Guilty as Sin?,” another lovely entry, is the rare Antonoff production that frames Swift’s voice not in rigid electronics but in a ’90s soft-rock atmosphere. On these tracks in particular, crisp Swiftian images emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something friends who “all smell like weed or little babies.”

It would not be a Swift album without an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song, and there is a doozy here called “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” which bristles with indignation over a grand, booming palette. Given the enormous cultural power that Swift wields, and the fact that she has played dexterously with humor and irony elsewhere in her catalog, it’s surprising she doesn’t deliver this one with a (needed) wink.

Plenty of great artists are driven by feelings of being underestimated, and have had to find new targets for their ire once they become too successful to convincingly claim underdog status. Beyoncé, who has reached a similar moment in her career, has opted to look outward. On her recently released “Cowboy Carter,” she takes aim at the racist traditionalists lingering in the music industry and the idea of genre as a means of confinement or limitation.

Swift’s new project remains fixed on her internal world. The villains of “The Tortured Poets Department” are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous “But Daddy I Love Him,” the “wine moms” and “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best” who cluck their tongues at our narrator’s dating decisions. (Some might speculate that these are actually shots at her own fans.) “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is probably the most satisfyingly vicious breakup song Swift has written since “All Too Well,” but it is predicated on a power imbalance that goes unquestioned. Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?

That’s a knotty question Swift might have been more keen to untangle on “Midnights,” an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood than she does here. It is to the detriment of “The Tortured Poets Department” that a certain starry-eyed fascination with fairy tales has crept back into Swift’s lyricism. It is almost singularly focused on the salvation of romantic love; I tried to keep a tally of how many songs yearningly reference wedding rings and ran out of fingers. By the end, this perspective makes the album feel a bit hermetic, lacking the depth and taut structure of her best work.

Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.

Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.

Taylor Swift “The Tortured Poets Department” (Republic)

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .

Review: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too

The saucy tennis melodrama “Challengers” is all about the emotional games we play with each other, though there are certainly enough volleys, balls and close-up sweat globules if you’re more into jockstraps than metaphors.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino ( “Call Me By Your Name” ) puts an art-house topspin on the sports movie, with fierce competition, even fiercer personalities and athletic chutzpah set to the thumping beats of a techno-rific Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score. “Challengers” (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) centers on the love triangle between doubles partners-turned-rivals ( Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor ) and a teen wunderkind ( Zendaya ) and how lust , ambition and power dynamics evolve their relationships over the course of 13 years.

The movie opens with Art (Faist) and Tashi (Zendaya) as the It couple of pro tennis: He’s eyeing a U.S. Open title, the only tournament he’s never won, while she’s his intense coach, manager and wife, a former sensation along the lines of a Venus or Serena whose career was cut short by a gnarly knee injury. To build up his flagging confidence after recent losses, Tashi enters Art in a lower-level event that he can dominate – until he faces ex-bestie Patrick (O’Connor) in the final match.

Justin Kuritzkes’ soapy screenplay bounces between that present and the trios’ complicated past via flashbacks, starting when Art and Patrick – a ride-or-die duo known as “Fire and Ice” – both have eyes for Tashi. All three are 18 and the hormones are humming: The boys have been tight since they were preteens at boarding school, but a late-night, three-way makeout session, and the fact that she’ll only give her number to whoever wins the guys' singles match, creates a seismic crack that plays itself out over the coming years.

All three main actors ace their arcs and changing looks over time – that’s key in a nonlinear film like this that’s all over the place. As Tashi, Zendaya plays a woman who exudes an unshakable confidence, though her passion for these two men is seemingly her one weakness. Faist (“West Side Story”) crafts Art as a talented precision player whose love for the game might not be what it once was, while O’Connor (“The Crown”) gives Patrick a charming swagger with and without a racket, even though his life has turned into a bit of a disaster.

From the start, the men's closeness hints at something more than friendship, a quasi-sexual tension that Tashi enjoys playing with: She jokes that she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker” yet wears a devilish smile when Art and Patrick kiss, knowing the mess she’s making.

Tennis is “a relationship,” Tashi informs them, and Guadagnino uses the sport to create moments of argumentative conversation as well as cathartic release. Propelled by thumping electronica, his tennis scenes mix brutality and grace, with stylish super-duper close-ups and even showing the ball’s point of view in one dizzying sequence. Would he do the same with, say, curling or golf? It’d be cool to see because more often than not, you want to get back to the sweaty spectacle.

Guadagnino could probably make a whole movie about masculine vulnerability in athletics rather than just tease it with “Challengers,” with revealing bits set in locker rooms and saunas. But the movie already struggles with narrative momentum, given the many tangents in Tashi, Art and Patrick’s thorny connections: While not exactly flabby, the film clocks in at 131 minutes and the script could use the same toning up as its sinewy performers.

While “Challengers” falls nebulously somewhere between a coming-of-age flick, dysfunctional relationship drama and snazzy sports extravaganza, Guadagnino nevertheless holds serve with yet another engaging, hot-blooded tale of flawed humans figuring out their feelings.

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Breaking Down the Bonkers But Perfect End of <i>Challengers</i>

Breaking Down the Bonkers But Perfect End of Challengers

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Challengers .

What is it about tennis that reminds directors of sex? Is it the fact that, unlike swimming or golf, the player must look across the net directly at their opponent? Is it the sheer athleticism on display? Is it the obvious love pun in the scoring? Whatever the reason, movies like Wimbledon , Match Point , A Room With a View , and even The Royal Tenenbaums set stories of lust on the tennis court. Usually a major moment in a game serves as metaphor: A ball that hits the net teaches a lesson about luck; an unlikely defeat represents a rocky moment in a relationship; a furtive glance during a match hints at buried feelings.

The new Zendaya movie Challengers is perhaps the horniest film in the genre to date. Players Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick ( Josh O’Connor ) spend the better part of two nearly decades vying for the affections of one-time tennis phenom Tashi (Zendaya). Their romantic rivalry culminates in a single match laden with erotic subtext, the outcome of which will determine the characters’ romantic futures. Director Luca Guadagnino volleys between the action of the match and flashbacks to the characters’ teenage years. The jumps back and forth in time become ever more erratic as the tension in the match builds. Tashi practically vibrates with each thwack of the ball. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s synth soundtrack crescendos as the boys stretch their long limbs across the court to catch each other’s drop shots.

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And yet we never learn who actually wins the face-off, let alone Tashi’s heart. Instead, Guadagnino makes a curious decision: He ends the movie not with match point but with an accidental-but-maybe-on-purpose mid-air hug at the net. A hug that thrusts the men together after a long match of lustful looks but no physical contact. A hug that’s more orgasmic than any sex we see in the movie. A hug that defies physics and (probably) the rules of tennis. It’s horny and ludicrous.

But it’s impossible to end a film of this nature any other way. Either man defeating the other would have been anticlimactic because Tashi is not actually the trophy they claim they’re pursuing. The hug makes it clear that two of the three characters are in love—and it’s not the pairing you might expect. And that’s the essence of Challengers : The story of a woman turned on by orchestrating erotic encounters between the men that love her.

The first flashback is key to understanding the drama at the center of this love triangle. We watch as young Art and Patrick—curiously close roommates who geekily call themselves “Fire and Ice”—win the doubles title at the U.S. Open Junior Championships in 2006. Patrick, arguably the better player but less diligent worker, agrees to let Art win their face-off in the singles tournament the next day.

But then the two boys watch the spellbinding Tashi grunt her way to her own juniors title. After flirting with Tashi at a party in her honor, they invite her back to their hotel room. Over a shared beer, Patrick admits that he taught Art how to masturbate. When they’re all sitting on the bed together, she leans back and coaxes—really, coaches—them to reach across her and kiss one another. She smirks.

The boys’ bond begins to fissure when the ultra-competitive Tashi interrupts the make out session to make an indecent proposal: She’ll give her phone number to whomever wins the next day’s match. She then exits the room, insisting she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker.”

Art and Patrick will spend the rest of their professional tennis careers competing for Tashi’s attention. So much for the bro code. Patrick breaks his promise to Art and wins the U.S. Open match. Later, when Art asks Patrick whether he slept with Tashi, Patrick demurs. He does, however, point out that Art has a habit of placing the ball in the throat of the racquet before he serves. Patrick mimics Art’s move, both mocking Art and signaling to him that he did in fact have sex with Tashi.

A collegiate relationship between Tashi and Patrick fizzles, and she soon faces a career-ending injury. In Patrick's absence, Art swoops in. Eventually Tashi and Art marry, and she becomes his coach.

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Flash forward to a giant billboard featuring Tashi and Art modeling luxury goods as tennis’ golden couple. Despite his success—or because of it—Art has lost his verve and keeps losing matches. When he mulls retirement, Tashi enters him into a challengers tournament in New Rochelle, N.Y., in hopes that he’ll snag an easy win and a confidence boost. That’s when Patrick stumbles back onto the scene. Living out of his car and finding shelter night-to-night by bedding women he meets on dating apps, Patrick has grown into a scruffy cad. For Tashi, he proves an irresistible counterbalance to good-natured golden boy Art. When all three characters realize the men will face off at the challengers tournament, Tashi makes threats and promises to each of her “two little white boys,” as she calls them during a pivotal scene.

Tashi tells Art she will divorce him if he loses, and promises to coach Patrick if he throws the match. Are these promises genuine? Does she want either of them? Both? All we know is Tashi wants to see a good tennis match. At the beginning of the movie she declares that playing a worthy opponent is similar to entering a relationship: “It’s like we were in love.” She’s turned on by the heat of competition and living vicariously through her husband and his former lover.

The film’s screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes describes tennis as a sport of near-misses: A player tries to get a ball just past another. “There’s a deep intimacy in that, and a lot of repression,” he told Variety . “It’s very sexy. And you usually play tennis against somebody of the same gender, so tennis, by its nature, then becomes almost homoerotic.”

In theory, this is Zendaya’s film. After all, she is the movie star—fresh off the box office success of Dune: Part Two , Zendaya is one of the biggest celebrities in the world, known as much for her acting as her red-carpet fashion. Faist and O’Connor, who broke out in West Side Story and The Crown , respectively, are stupendous in the film. But Zendaya is the center of gravity, and the marketing team knows it. For an original drama with no ties to I.P. and a mid-sized budget, Challengers is everywhere—thanks to her. You’ve probably spotted Zendaya serving dozens of preppy looks on the press tour while her co-stars smile shyly in the background.

Guadagnino, known for the sensual gay love story Call Me By Your Name and the tense, erotic thriller Suspiria , plays with audience expectations. No stranger to fostering movie stars—by casting both Timothée Chalamet and Dakota Johnson in key roles early in their careers, he helped launch them into the Hollywood stratosphere—Guadagnino capitalizes on Zendaya’s offscreen star power: The movie begins and ends on her face.

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And throughout the film, Guadagnino positions Zendaya in the center of several shots, with the two boys flanking her. When the three first meet in 2006, Tashi invites Art and Patrick to her hotel room. She beckons them both onto her bed, and they scramble to each side of her like eager puppies. Later, during the movie’s climactic tennis match, she sits exactly in the center of the stands, swiveling her head back and forth to look at each man on either side of the court. Though impassive, she’s in the middle of the action. She adopts an iciness reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn as suitors flitted around her in The Philadelphia Story . Zendaya is the unattainable object of desire. It’s how a director frames a movie star.

But it’s a feint. Tashi is nothing but bait. Just as Tashi orchestrated that kiss between the boys in their youth, she lures the men into their final embrace in the film, sitting between them in the stands—the supposed prize—when actually what the boys wanted was one another all along.

Art and Patrick’s suppressed attraction to one another isn’t exactly subtle. Perhaps in a nod to the infamous Call Me By Your Name peach scene , Art and Patrick are constantly munching on phallic foods in Challengers : bananas, hot dogs, even a churro. Before their epic match, Patrick taunts Art with the possibility that he's having an affair with Tashi, but does so while the two men sit in the sauna, clad in only strategically placed towels.

It’s not the only scene that takes in their physical forms: The camera pays tribute to the men’s taut bodies with their polos stretching across bulging pectorals. Guadagnino even shoots the men from below the court, sweat dripping from their faces onto the camera. Despite being billed as a sexy romance, the movie’s steamiest scenes are reserved for the court. Each break point its own small climax. As we flash back and forth to the New Rochelle match, Guadagnino experiments with ways to build the tempo: The camera takes on the perspective of the balls and even the racquets as we watch the men make a number of increasingly desperate shots.

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At a pivotal moment in the match, Patrick places the ball in the throat of the racquet before a serve, a callback to Art’s signature move that Patrick used to signal he slept with Tashi earlier in the film. Paired with a smug grin, the gesture signals to Art that Patrick slept with his wife (again). And then the near-comatose Art comes alive. Does he pick up on Patrick’s clues about the affair? Does he somehow know that Tashi has asked Patrick to throw the game? Does he simply hope to impress his wife and prove once and for all he’s the better player?

One thing is for sure: he feels an electricity from his old partner on the other side of the court. Patrick, for his part, never smiles wider than when he’s provoking his former friend. In this dysfunctional polycule, an affair with Tashi is a means to reawaken the fire in his true object of desire, Art.

The men make eyes at each other, and the pace picks up. The tennis becomes more athletic, the shots more dramatic, sweat all but flooding the court. It’s Fire and Ice, back together again after all these years. Tashi’s head continues to swivel, and she doesn’t know how to react. The boys don’t seem to notice—they’re having fun.

The tennis match becomes foreplay, and a reminder of what they used to be. In the end, the boys embrace. The final shot lands on Tashi’s face, usually impassive but now elated. The puppet master has engineered a reunion of these two men and prodded their competitive spirits once again. The game is so on.

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