Challengers is a killer love triangle romance that hates love

There's something to be said about the movies on our marquees lately.  

A presciently pessimistic war drama is spurring on conversation on the future of American democracy. A psychedelic, worm-heavy space opera is topping the box office. A black comedy on lesbian bodybuilders is solidly outperforming expectations. 

And despite hardly being about sports or love at all, topsy-turvy tennis ménage à trois Challengers is already hotly anticipated — so much that if CBC added its similarly named 1991 film The Challengers to Gem, it could probably make up its entire deficit from confused new subscribers hoping to spot Zendaya.

That's not to say mainstream movie-going is perfect, but it's hard not to feel optimistic walking out of the Zendaya-led and -produced feature.

Because even in spite of occasional messy plotting — and line delivery so stilted it must be camp — Challengers does pretty much exactly what it says it will on the tin.

It's a slow-building marvel that challenges everyone: its characters, on how far they'll go for the film's central theme; its writer, on the division between reality and fiction; and its viewers, on what they personally define as admirable and, conversely, as villainous.

That's a lot to ask for a story that essentially begins with teenagers looking to grab a beer at a party. But Challengers has a lot more going on beneath the surface.

Unpacking starts with looking at its three pro-tennis leads. First, there's Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a human doormat stuck in an athletic slump, and so figuratively retiring you start to wish he'd do it literally, instead.

There's his boarding school bedfellow and supposed best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor), a rugged natural superstar who seems immune to every obstacle except his unrelenting self-confidence. 

Then there's Zendaya's Tashi Duncan. A true self-possessed force of nature, Tashi is the paragon of power and control, in a drama that looks to find out why we need those both so much.

That's true on and off the court here. We start at the end, in an ostensibly low-stakes match between mid-30s Patrick and Art — with Tashi watching in the stands — and spend the rest of the film figuring out how we got there. 

Though we meet Tashi as Art's wife and coach, Patrick as a meandering bum sleeping in his car outside of tournaments and Art as a celebrity on a losing streak, there's a history.

In a stylishly disjointed style, we jump around to see the come-up of all three, the plotting and feints in their playing as well as in their ways of winning their partner.

And most prophetically, there's Tashi's belief that tennis — and specifically winning — is not a sport; "it's a relationship."