Warning: This story contains major spoilers for “Challengers.”
“Challengers” follows 13 years in the lives of three romantically entangled tennis stars, but its sudden, screeching ending has some viewers asking, “What just happened?”
Starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, “Challengers,” which hit theaters April 26, sees the three tennis prodigies meet as teens, leading to a love triangle. Their dynamic is only further complicated by a career-ending injury, lies, marriage, a child, and a reunion on the court.
The result is a film best described by its screenwriter as an “erotic tennis thriller.”
“I was watching all this tennis, and it was starting to be the thing that was holding my attention, more than any movie I was watching or anything I was watching on my computer,” the “Challengers” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes tells TODAY.com.
So he asked himself two questions.
“One was, what could I write that would be as good as watching tennis? And what would make tennis even better?” he says. “And for me, the answer to the question of what would make tennis even better is, if I could know exactly what was at stake for each player at every moment in the match.”
Framed by a match between Art (Faist) and Patrick (O’Connor) with Tashi (Zendaya), now a tennis coach, looking on, each thrilling sequence of tennis demonstrates the secrets within the group and ends with a shocking reveal for their personal lives and an ambiguous path into their futures.
Each flashback during the match reveals a new twist in the narrative that only raises the stakes of the match.
“I knew I wanted to drop the audience right into a tennis match where they can sense that there’s some unspoken stuff going on, and then gradually figure out why everybody is looking at each other like this match matters more than a Grand Slam,” Kuritzkes says.
As the final few volleys of the film play out (with an aggressive synth soundtrack in the background), it's impossible not to be on the edge of your seat. And when the screen fades to black, it feels like falling out of the tennis stands and back into a theater.
Read on as Kuritzkes unpacks the complicated dynamics at the center of the film and breaks down that shocking, sudden ending.
(Seriously, turn back now for no spoilers.)
What happens in ‘Challengers’?
The film opens with the adult trio of Tashi, Art and Patrick meeting again at a Challenger tournament, aka the second-tier of tennis competition behind the ATP Tour, known for the four Grand Slams.
The score moves back and forth throughout the film, with Patrick taking the first set, before Art is able to recover. As the game wears on, the flashbacks get closer to the present.
So first, we'll put all that has transpired since that fateful hotel room hookup between Tashi, Art and Patrick into somewhat chronological order.
Tashi and Patrick start dating after Patrick beats Art in their youth tournament, giving him the victor's rights to Tashi's phone number.
Patrick decides to immediately join the competition circuit while Tashi and Art head to Stanford to play collegiate tennis, where they become friends.
Art, nurturing a seed of jealousy, at one point asks Patrick if he and Tashi have slept together. Patrick, aiming to be discrete, says if they did, he would imitate Art's signature serve, in which he rests the ball in the throat of the racket. (They did.)
Tashi and Patrick maintain a passionate long-distance relationship in college that implodes after Art plants a seed in Tashi's head that Patrick doesn't love her. Patrick also grows tired of Tashi's critiques of his playing. After a fight, Patrick doesn't attend one of her matches, and Tashi is injured, destroying her knee, ending her career and solidifying her split with Patrick.
Time passes and as Art and Tashi grow closer, she eventually agrees to be his coach. They get married and have a child. But after running into Patrick in Atlanta, Tashi shares a kiss with her former flame.
Art becomes a renowned player, winning multiple Grand Slams with his precise, “classic” style of play, but he struggles to secure a win at the U.S. Open. To boost his confidence, Tashi enters him in a Challengers tournament, where he faces off against a washed-up Patrick, who’s playing solely for the money.
The night before the championship, Tashi calls Patrick and asks him to throw the match for his former friend. After some angry verbal sparring, he agrees and, in the middle of a storm, they hook up in Patrick’s car.
Who wins the match between Art and Patrick?
The final scenes of the film occur during the game between Art and Patrick. One of their sets goes to a tie-break, and the competition intensifies.
Tashi exchanges meaningful glances with Patrick, seemingly reminding him of his promise to throw the match so Art can win. But instead, when it's his turn to serve again, Patrick rests the tennis ball in the throat of the racket, communicating across the net to Art that he and Tashi slept together.
It's a scene that has elicited shock inside theaters.
Zendaya teased the moment by posting a picture of the gesture to her Instagram story April 25, writing over it, "Iykyk," or "if you know you know."
From then, the tennis turns aggressive and heated, culminating in a final volley that sees Art jump and in slow-motion, falling over the net into Patrick's arms, and the old friends hug.
Tashi, who earlier in the film explained her belief that tennis is a relationship, jumps out of her seat and screams, “Come on!”
The film ends, and it's unclear who won the point, or the match as a whole. But to Kuritzkes, it doesn't matter.
“The question of ‘Who wins the match?’ just felt so totally irrelevant,” he says.
Why did ‘Challengers’ end like that?
From the beginning, Kuritzkes says, “I knew that the movie (was) over the moment all their cards are out on the table.”
“In many ways, this is a movie about people who can only really speak their hearts on the tennis court, through action, through playing,” he says. “There’s so many things that they want to say to each other, there’s so many things they want to understand about each other, or recognize about each other — that they can only really get to when they’re playing.”
So when Patrick finally divulges his and Tashi’s tryst, there’s no more secrets between the trio.
The final volley between Patrick and Art also calls back to one of Tashi’s sentiments from early in the film that essentially, she just wants to see “some good f------ tennis.”
“I think by the end for me, they’re playing all of a sudden,” he says. “Art and Patrick are playing a real point, and somehow Tashi is playing, too. So the movie’s over.”
The narrative doesn’t extend beyond that, Kuritzkes says.
“Those people, they exist the moment we meet them, and they stop existing the moment we leave,” he says.
It’s why we watch movies at all, he says.
“I go to movies to be pushed towards a moment of catharsis, or a moment of revelation, or something. That’s the thing I’m seeking after: that moment,” he says. “That moment should feel like a gust of wind. Once it hits you, you got what you came for.”
“At least that’s how I feel.”
What the cast and crew have said about the ending
The various interpretations of the ending extend to the cast and crew.
Zendaya told the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan that she and her mom disagreed about the ending of the film, which she added is “confusing.”
Zendaya thought her character was happy at finally seeing the tennis match of her dreams at the ending, while her mom thought Tashi was “pissed.”
“My mom read the ending so different. My mom is like, ‘She’s pissed because they realize that they don’t need her anymore,'” Zendaya said. “I was like, ‘But I smile a little bit at the end!’”
Faist said it’s purposefully “interpretative,” while O’Connor added that “everyone’s got a different perspective on it.”
“Isn’t it so beautiful that we have an open ending that people like? Because everybody says, ‘No. Never open ending. You have to know what happens at the end,” director Luca Guadagnino said.
As for what might have happened next, Guadagnino said, “They go back to the hotel room.”
