The game of tennis is simple: hit the ball over the net and make sure it lands between the straight white lines. It’s simpler than life, though tennis, like all other sports, is designed to act as its mirror – spectator sports are enticing because they lay bare the emotions that the complications of real life often obfuscate. Tennis is weaponised in this same way in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, a psychosexual sports drama that marries the mercuriality of love and lust with the capriciousness of a sport oft won by millimetres.

Though it may seem more at home between the pages of an airport paperback, the simplicity of the film’s central conceit is also its strength. Challengers chronicles a love triangle between three athletes: Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a soft, doe-eyed grand-slam winner, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), his mysterious but agonisingly chic coach-slash-wife, and the scruffy, wayward Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), whose success on tour peaks at qualifiers. The three were first acquainted when they were teenagers, when Art (blonde) and Patrick (brunette) both fell helplessly in love with Tashi after watching her play at a juniors match.

It’s a different match, however, that acts as the film’s anchor: a tournament final in New Rochelle, where an adult Art and Patrick find themselves competing against each other after a long period of estrangement. It’s been over a decade since they first met Tashi, and the angst accumulated over the years since that first, critical encounter is evident from the violence of their tennis. Challengers returns time and time again to this match, which unfolds over the course of the film, interspersed with long flashbacks, which enable Guadagnino to gradually reveal the particulars of the trio’s storied history. The film flicks backwards and forwards through this chronology, from the time the boys first set eyes on Tashi to the night prior to the New Rochelle final. From the film’s structure it is clear that the outcome of this match will determine the victor not only of the tournament, but also of Tashi’s ultimate affections.

Mike Faist as Art, Zendaya as Tashi, and Josh O’Connor as Patrick (courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)

As a conveyor of desire, Guadagnino remains a master. Nowhere has the voyeurism of sports felt more dangerous than through the unblinking gazes of young Art and Patrick, lean and shaggy-haired, as they fawn open-mouthed at Tashi’s backhand from the court-side bleachers. A scene set later that night, when the two boys succumb to the sway of Tashi’s seduction (a tool that Zendaya wields with all the ease of Rafael Nadal swinging a racquet), escalates to long-form pashing that, under less indulgent direction, might seem unconvincing, but with Guadagnino is anything but. The physical rituals of sport, too, are rendered overtly sexual – we see thighs press against tight shorts, hair flatten with sweat, bodies clap against bodies.

In Guadagnino’s previous films, the allure of romance is reflected in the worlds that the lovelorn characters inhabit. Both Call Me By Your Name (2017) and A Bigger Splash (2015) felt as powerful an ode to bucolic Italian villas as they did to the complexities of human connection. But love on the ATP tour doesn’t offer the same sensual pleasures that Guadagnino is famous for conjuring. The 35-millimetre aesthetics of Challengers lean towards something more playful – the acrylic blue of the hard courts, the matte-orange plastic racquets, and the dimmed fluorescence of the yellow tennis balls constitute a curiously toyish palette for a turbulent romance.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s exultant synth-pop score introduces a surprising levity – needle-drops in the middle of impassioned scenes lighten what could otherwise constitute the film’s more serious moments, and makes Challengers feel, at times, like a particularly elaborate music video. The film’s dedication to these stylistic flourishes, though fun, are not without sacrifice – as a result, the characters’ motivations and decisions, particularly Tashi’s, are unpersuasive. Rather, the story bends to the whim of whatever path feels more cool and more severe. There is little feeling that the shifting tides of infatuation between Art, Patrick, and Tashi yield to anything much deeper. There is little pathos.

Instead, there is tennis – tennis, which defines these characters’ lives and enriches them with meaning. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom toys with the rush of the game. In capturing the sport he often positions the camera at the level of the net or high above the court but also sometimes, shakily, from the perspective of the players, as they serve and sprint and hit, or from the ball itself, which careens in wild angles from racquet to racquet.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the passion derived from the sport is a clear metaphor for romantic ardour. Justin Kuritzkes’s script offers no ambiguity in linking Art and Patrick’s athletic contests with their competition over Tashi: even when they were teenagers, they played for her phone number. There are scenes in which the characters openly question whether they are talking about tennis or their own personal lives. The line blurs. But efforts to equate the desires of the central trio with this fierce but regimented sport oversimplify the intricacy of their entanglements. The New Rochelle final upon which the film is structured feels inadequate to properly resolve any conclusion that Tashi, or the others, must ultimately reach. As we reach the final points of this pivotal match, there is a growing sense that it doesn’t matter who’s winning – just as long as a game is being played.

The Challengers (Universal Pictures) is in cinemas nationally from 18 April 2024.