"Challengers" in One Sentence
How to build hierarchies of desire
In this post, let’s look at what makes the sexy tennis movie so erotic, and how you can use a similar technique to build up hierarchies of desire and tension in your own stories. I’m referring, of course, to Challengers, a film released in April 2024, directed by Luca Guadagnino, written by Justin Kuritzkes, and starring Zendaya.
As GQ noted soon after its release, this film “won last weekend in the zeitgeist as well as at the box office, dominating group chats, social media feeds, and even the GQ Slack. In this post-monolithic age of media consumption, it’s increasingly rare for any release—barring peak Marvel or juggernautish new studio albums by the likes of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift—to become that central to the conversation.”
Because this movie builds so strongly to a highly specific vibe in the final scene, which we need to unpack to really understand what it’s doing, this craft breakdown does contain spoilers. You should still be able to follow this post if you haven’t seen the movie, and if you do watch it after reading this, you’ll do so with the increased perceptual fluency of a second viewing and strong eye for its boldest craft moves.
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The Emotional Superstructure of “Challengers”
An elite tennis coach must fire up her tiring champion husband to play the best tennis of his life, against a man with whom they both share an erotic past.
How to Build Hierarchies of Desire
I’m going to start by describing the final scene because everything else in this movie exists to help us understand exactly what it means. It is the apotheosis of the movie’s vibes and everything else builds up to it.
A very attractive and stylishly-dressed woman, Tashi, sits front and center in the bleachers, amidst a modest crowd of tennis spectators watching two men play. She is both coach and wife to one of the men, Art.
What’s at stake for her is that she used to be an elite tennis player herself before becoming permanently sidelined by an injury. The best way she has found to continue using her elite skills is to coach her husband, who has had a reasonably illustrious career.
But, as the movie opens, Art is tired and underperforming and pretty much ready to retire. Tashi can’t imagine what they would do or be to each other without tennis, and would rather see them achieve one more career victory together. She has brought them to this second-tier challenger tournament to try and boost Art’s confidence ahead of the U.S. Open, which he would achieve a career grand slam by winning this year.
All of this is to say, Tashi very much wants Art to win this game. And because the game is tied going into this tie-breaker scene, it means she very much wants Art to win this point. But is this the thing she truly desires most in the world?
Regardless of everything else on the line, in the second-to-last serve of the movie, Art hits the ball straight at his opponent Patrick’s head on purpose, and misses, and screams.
This is because, during the previous point, Patrick mimicked a tic of Art’s serve — touching the ball to the center of the racket before serving — which is code for the fact that he slept with Tashi the previous night (and not the first time in the trio’s history that this signal has been used). Art is mad about this, but that is not all he feels.
Before the last serve, he cracks a smile. Patrick returns it. These two have had an erotic energy of their own going back at least to their days as adolescent tennis academy bunkmates, when Patrick taught Art to masturbate. And nothing lights a fire under often-icy Art quite like competing with Patrick for Tashi (whom Patrick dated first, before she and Art got together).
We become the ball, flying back and forth across the court, spinning wildly between Art’s and Patrick’s intense, sweaty grunts. They are both playing ferociously, clearly giving it everything they’ve got. This is a marked contrast to even just a few minutes ago, when Art’s initial shock at the news caused him to freeze and purposely forfeit a game-tying point to Patrick. And it’s a contrast from the lackluster season Art has been having for the whole film.
An overhead shot of the action turns into an overhead shot of Tashi’s head whipping back and forth to follow it, her palms dragging anxiously down her thighs. She’s worked out that Patrick has communicated to Art what happened last night.
Ostensibly, she did it to try and convince Patrick to throw the game and let Art win. During their post-coital embrace, Patrick asks her if she’s sure that’s what she wants and she responds, “what else could I want?”
But we’ve already learned in one of the trio’s much earlier scenes, when they were all teenagers, that there is something Tashi wants to see much more than Art winning. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Art and Patrick lunge closer and closer to the net as they play. At the net, they both jump for the ball, as Tashi and much of the audience jump out of their seats.
We get a shot of Patrick below, Art above. Someone — it’s unclear who — hits the ball and it flies off. The point is over and the story is not about to let us know who won it. Patrick, who is broke and, having underperformed for much of his once-promising career, using this challenger tournament to attempt a comeback, also has a lot at stake here. Enough to have even prompted him to ask Tashi to be his coach next season, though his refusal to let her do that and insistence on her treating him like a peer is what led to their breakup in their younger days. (Tashi didn’t think it was a great use of her time and talents to date Patrick and not try to perfect his game.)
The two men fall into each other’s arms and the audience cheers. They embrace with the same erotic intensity with which they’d just been playing. Estranged best friends who once seemed to mirror each other’s every move, even and especially when they were competing for Tashi’s attention, they’ve rapidly reclaimed that energy, many times over.
With a grimace, Tashi leaps to her feet and screams, “Come on!!!” For a moment, her expression could be read as angry. But then her face splits into an enormous smile and it becomes clear that this was a scream of elation. Her ecstatic laughter, as she jumps up and down and claps, is the final image, then the movie cuts to black.
Director Luca Guadagnino thinks that after this moment, the trio goes back to the hotel room together, but screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes makes it clear this isn’t the point for him:
“I don't care [where they go],” Kuritzkes says. “I think, for me, what I'm interested in is that by the end of the movie, they're all really playing tennis and they're playing the best tennis of their lives, everybody and all their cards are out on the table. There's nothing left for them to say to each other at that point. They're having the most open and honest conversation of their lives, and they're doing it through tennis, so what happens after that? I think that's for the audience to think about. For me, I've gotten what I need from the movie at that point.”
To return to the question of what else Tashi could want in that final scene, when the trio first meet as teenagers, she tells Patrick that he isn’t a real tennis player because he doesn’t know what tennis is.
“What is it?” he asks.
“It’s a relationship,” Tashi quickly responds.
“Is that what you and Anna Meuller had today?” Patrick presses, referring to Tashi’s earlier opponent, whom she has already called a “racist bitch.”
Tashi nods. “It is, actually. For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis, and we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It was like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.”
“You screamed when you hit the winner,” Art observes. “Never heard anything like it before.”
This scene gives us Tashi’s definition of the best tennis, an elusive relationship that transcends even winning and losing. Winning — usually an indicator of the best performance in sports — is important, but this seems to be what Tashi is really chasing, her take on the “best tennis” mentioned in the superstructure above.
Winning alone cannot be a measure of playing the best tennis, because it is possible to win against people who don’t really challenge you, and it is possible to win in a thrown game, as the movie makes clear on multiple occasions.
In the following scene, Tashi takes the boys up on an offer to hang out in their hotel room, which leads to an iconic three-way make-out session on the bed that foreshadows the final scene I described above. Tashi enjoys kissing first Art, then Patrick, but what she enjoys most is bringing both boys together to make out vigorously with each other, while she leans back and watches smugly for a good long stretch before they open their eyes and realize what she’s done.
As she leaves, both still want to get her number. She promises it to whoever wins their match tomorrow, which Patrick had already promised to throw to Art.
“You can beat him, you know,” Tashi says knowingly to Art. “You should beat him, actually.”
“Are you saying you want me to?” Art presses, trying to gauge where he stands.
“I’m saying you’re not going to get my number if you don’t.”
“But what do you want?”
“I want to watch some good fucking tennis.”
These scenes taken together pretty much tell us how to read the final scene. More than she cares about being with either one of them, Tashi thrills at putting Art and Patrick in action together, as only she can. More than she cares about one or the other of them winning, she wants to see what she has defined as real tennis: a relationship, going somewhere beautiful together.
I think what makes this movie so erotically tense is that the trio can communicate so much more through tennis — and take on so much more importance to each other through tennis — than they could even through sex.
For adult Tashi, simply orchestrating another threesome would hardly count for much. Adult Art could never have this kind of chemistry with any other opponent.
So Tashi firing these two up, as only she can, in a way that they’re suddenly playing the best tennis of their lives — according to her precise, long-held vision of what constitutes the best tennis — is a much more thrilling accomplishment than just being with Art or Art winning tennis matches, both of which she has experienced plenty of in her adult life.
And this is exactly the career win that the final scene delivers to us.
Key takeaway for story creators: You can build tension by using hierarchies of desire. Show us an expected desire your character has (like winning at tennis) and then a less-expected desire that runs even deeper for them (like experiencing and orchestrating the best tennis). What does their life look like if they get what they think they want, versus if they get what they really, really want?
If you’re feeling inspired enough by Challengers, you can build erotic tension by showing us what your characters want in the realm of sex (like getting two guys who love you to make out), and then what they want even more than that (like getting two guys who love you to play the best tennis of their lives).