As anyone who has spent any time in a locker room knows, there are particular markers of the straight experience that are, in their way, very queer. After all, how many of us have been exposed to that brand of aggressive heterosexuality which is defined entirely by its negative relationship to queerness, and in its desperation to escape that which it fears, invariably becomes it?

Which is sort of the whole deal of Challengers, the new film by Luca Guadagnino. Not that you’d necessarily know that from the marketing materials. Written by Justin Kuritzkes, the film has been pitched both as an exploration of a love triangle, and a film guided by Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a tennis hotshot-turned-coach. In actual fact, it is neither of these things. Instead, it is about two young men—Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor)—who lack the necessary language to explain their attraction to each other. And so, rather than speaking to one another directly, they first use tennis to explain themselves, and then use Tashi. Indeed, the threesome teased in the film’s trailer is not about a trio of lovers, but about two lovers, Art and Patrick, who find each other through their attraction to a woman they then seem to largely forget about, one way or the other.

In that way, Challengers is a film about the stinging closeness between hatred and desire. When we meet Art and Patrick, they are attached at the hip, young tennis prodigies who share their own private language, as all lovers do. When they come across Tashi, a fellow player, it’s not that she drives them apart—although it’s true they both chase her, to varying degrees of success—but that she pushes them together. She makes them aware of the fleshy want that has been sitting underneath their friendship for all these years.

This throughline simplifies what could otherwise be an overwhelming film. Challengers cuts back and forth between the present and the past, hopping between betrayals, affairs, and tennis matches. But the timeline never gets muggy or confused, because wherever you drop into the picture, you’re essentially watching the same thing: Art and Patrick trying to beat each other off, with the ‘off’ in that sentence becoming more or less silent depending on where we are in the proceedings.

Guadagnino has stated that Challengers is unlike the films he usually makes, but it is this investigation into desire that makes it totally of a piece with Call Me By Your Name (2017). Here, as it did there, Guadagnino’s camera constantly roams; images burst with palpable tension and erotica, and scenes wind up until they are impossibly taut. Subtext is for cowards on the tennis court, it seems.

If that makes Challengers sound extraordinarily literal, it’s because it is. In fact, the pleasures of the film come from its simplicity. There’s a sort of heat impression that Challengers gives off—oozing as it is with shots of twisting bodies and sultry stares—that deliberately defies much complicated cognition, and although the film is structured around a hotly contested tennis match, in a way, it never matters a great deal who is going to win. The tension doesn’t come from the simple binary between victory and defeat. It comes from the sweat, from the trying, from the wanting.

And when the film’s resolution does come, in a rough embrace between two of the characters who once seemed like they were never again going to embrace, one isn’t left with a great deal to think about, as much as they are left with a great deal to physically experience. This is cinema that works via the body, more than the mind. At one point, during an argument about sex, Patrick asks Tashi if they’ve actually been talking about tennis. “I’m always talking about tennis,” Tashi says. Here, tennis is fucking, and fucking is tennis. No more, thrillingly, to say about it than that.

Challengers releases in Australian cinemas on April 18.

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Joseph Earp is an author, poet, critic, and journalist. His novel Painting Portraits Of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated will be released by Pantera Press in 2025.