Life is a lot like tennis; it’s a constant back and forth with the powers that be looking to beat you down. But, also, tennis is like a relationship, and tennis is like sex. Tennis is a lot of damn things beyond a sport frequented by wine-drunk country club moms and the most talented athletes you’ve literally ever seen in your life. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (actually stylized in film as Luca Guadagino’s Challengers, which I support when the filmmaker behind it has earned it, like Guadagnino absolutely has), posits tennis as the end all-be all of parables to life itself as the ultimate compress/repress of the beauty and flaws of human nature, or, in layman’s terms: this is messy! We are messy! Not just “we” as in humans facing situations not dissimilar to those in Challengers (though not many of us are tennis prodigies), but also “we” as viewers of Challengers reveling in just how messy events devolve. For a film about (mostly) heterosexual people and their web of deceit in getting what they want from tennis via sex, there’s no denying that Guadagnino infuses Challengers with a distinctly queer vision of high drama only a gay Italian man with a sick sense of humor could provide, and combines it with some of the most electric filmmaking I’ve seen in ages. Now, audiences can bring Challengers (2024), a genuinely electrifying film, home on an absolutely inexcusable home media release from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment that is as lazy as they come.
If you want to learn about Challengers in a more spoiler-free way, head over to the initial theatrical release review from EoM Contributor Andrew Eisenman.
L-R: Zendaya stars as Tashi and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in director Luca Guadagnino’s CHALLENGERS, an Amazon MGM Studios film. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise. © 2024 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
While Challengers jumps around the timeline substantially to reveal elements of the story in phases, the film’s timeline begins in 2006 as Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), high school senior and tennis prodigy, smashes the Junior US Open, catching the eye of junior doubles champions and longtime best friends Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist). When their interactions spawn a steamy love triangle, so begins a years-long push-and-pull between the three. Thirteen years later, Tashi, having been seriously injured during a match, is relegated to coaching Art, now her husband, as he navigates the professional tour on a losing streak. Losing faith and love in her husband’s inability to win, she enters him in a small-time challenger tournament to regain his confidence, but is shaken to find his opponent to be the down-on-his-luck Patrick, kickstarting a resurgence of tensions and feelings among the three, both on and off the court, after over a decade.
L-R: Mike Faist stars as Art and Zendaya as Tashi in director Luca Guadagnino’s CHALLENGERS, an Amazon MGM Studios film. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise. © 2024 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Challengers is a delightfully horny film, not in the sense that there is a lot of sex onscreen, in fact, there is shockingly little in the way of actual depicted sex in the film, but rather the pervasive power that sex has over relationships, careers, reputations, etc.. There isn’t a moment in Challengers where sex isn’t dictating every move and decision each of the three leads make, whether it be Art’s longing of approval from Tashi, Tashi’s desire to foster a winner of any kind, regardless of who it hurts, or Patrick’s unrequited love and jealousy of Art in the years following their youth, Guadagnino (Bones and All) knows how to make Challengers feel explicit without ever having to show you much of anything beyond passionate kissing. It’s that sort of expressive filmmaking that’s been missing from films which have begun to feel incredibly sexless as of late, and even films with sex in them have begun to lack the understanding and passion that comes into depicting what that the films of Paul Verhoeven (Showgirls) and Adrian Lyne (Jacob’s Ladder) would never dream of leaving out. Guadagnino gets it.
Director Luca Guadagnino on the set of CHALLENGERS, a Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures film. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures. © 2023 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
However, what Guadagnino might get even more is how to stage and shoot the actual game of tennis in a way that I’ve genuinely never seen before in a sports film. Particularly in the last 15 minutes, the absolute synergy between Guadagnino, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Call Me By Your Name; Suspiria (2018); genuinely the finest DP in the game at the moment), editor Marco Costa (Bones and All), and composers Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (The Killer, more on them later) created something so electric, so truly special, and so incredibly energizing that as someone who has been begging for unique, daring visions in big-budget studio filmmaking for years now, I began to react to it in IMAX much how an impassioned fan would watching their favorite athlete play in real life. It’s not just that Guadagnino is good, it’s that every cog in the Challengers machine is oiled up and meshing beautifully with one another, manufacturing things never experienced before.
Meanwhile, amongst a cast of already very talented and accomplished actors, come all three of their best performances to date, even if they all aren’t, on paper, their most bombastic. Sure, Josh O’Connor’s Emmy-winning turn transforming into the slimy Prince Charles on Netflix’s The Crown might have turned more heads, or Mike Faist’s breakout film role of Riff in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, too, but the subtleties in their performances, detailing every nuance of their degrading relationship over each specific time period the film lands and is truly the thing that makes film acting so magical in its subtleties. However, and unsurprisingly, it’s mega-superstar Zendaya (Dune) who drives away with Challengers in the palm of her hand as master manipulator Tashi Duncan-Donaldson. While Zendaya could’ve settled on a more obvious turn for the character, providing audiences with a far more straightforward, plainly antagonistic evil queen who serves as the film’s central heel (which, don’t get me wrong, the gays would have eaten up all the same), she goes beyond the simple call of bad bitchery and injects Tashi with such a tortured, broken soul burdened by the idea of what could’ve once been of her career and the life she could’ve had with Patrick. It’s what fuels her brashness in her work, her disdain for her husband’s lack of drive, and her want to win by any means necessary. It’s a wonderfully twisted, but deeply layered performance that creates one of the most interesting central characters in a film since perhaps Cate Blanchett’s turn in Todd Field’s Tár (2022).
And while this is all thanks to the excellent screenplay from Justin Kuritzkes (Queer), it’s also the power of knowing that Kuritzkes is the husband of Celine Song, writer/director of Past Lives (2023), that gives Challengers an additional layer of “Jesus Christ, are y’all okay over there in your marriage?,” and I think that’s beautiful.
So, what sort of home release does an expertly made, financially successful, widely adored, and culturally relevant film receive from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment through their partnership with Amazon MGM Studios? Something that says “Count yourself lucky we gave this a home release at all.” Challengers comes home in a single Blu-ray release, with no 4K release in sight, no special features to speak of, and barely even a functioning menu screen — for a film like this, it’s a disgrace. It’s very indicative of the relationship that Warner Bros. has fostered with physical media under the Zaslav-era, but, also, in particular, of physical media of studios that don’t even carry the Warner Bros. name. You would think that with Amazon’s recent acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and their penchant for creating their own line of products of all kinds through their Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials line, they could learn a thing or two about creating quality home media releases for their theatrically-released films which deserve better than this.
Still, I’ll give what little credit is due. It would be incredibly difficult for anything shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom to look bad in any format, but, thankfully, even in 1080p, Challengers still looks superb on Blu-ray. They have retained the beautiful film grain from the 35 mm stock the film was shot on, and it preserves a lovely, unabashed texture that you just can’t get from the flatter, more sterile look of digital. Paired with that is an even better Dolby Atmos audio track that brings the soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, a score that has yet to be topped this year (yes, even by Hans Zimmer’s Dune: Part Two score, which is also excellent but…isn’t this), to the best life it could’ve asked for on home media. It’s all a part of the beautiful synergy that I spoke of before that brings this to life, and having seen the film theatrically in IMAX, I can only imagine what more life the film could’ve brought in 4K, or how we could dissect that life piece-by-piece with some special features.
L-R: Mike Faist stars as Art and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in director Luca Guadagnino’s CHALLENGERS, an Amazon MGM Studios film. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise. © 2024 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Challengers is a special film made by special people who deserve the utmost kudos for injecting life into a genre of film that hasn’t seen true greatness in a long time. So why can’t the studio releasing its home media also give credit to that? I understand that physical media is dying, I don’t want to accept it, but whether we like it or not, major studios are forcing us into an all-digital future that is going to come about from shafting consumers looking for the ultimate home experience of new films they love and are treated to lazy, sterile, barebones releases for the same price as ones that actually try to do something special. It makes me wish for studios without their own distribution arms to take up shop with boutique labels like Kino Lorber, Shout! Factory, Vinegar Syndrome, and Arrow Video, among others, for their home media distribution to actually put forth releases worth the quality of the films they’re releasing theatrically. Maybe that’s too much to ask from a studio owned by Amazon, and maybe that’s overestimating how often Amazon MGM Studios will put out a film like Challengers when their next big release is the Santa Action Comedy Red One (2024) starring Dwayne Johnson (Faster), Chris Evans (The Losers), and the rest of my will to live, but I can dream, right?
Available on Blu-ray July 9th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Amazon MGM Studios Challengers webpage.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Recommendation
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