Challengers promised me a threesome. 

Luca Guadagnino’s latest sells itself (and it’s sold itself very well, transcending the usual nicheness of Film Twitter and Letterboxd nerds) on the sexually charged love triangle between three young, hot, talented tennis players. 

Challengers is book-ended by a match between the sexy scumbag Patrick Sweig (Josh O’Connor) and the tight-wound, snake Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), with an elegantly bored Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) looking at them from the stands. The complications of their relationship unfold in a novelesque structure of flashbacks to thirteen years prior, when they first met as college athletes. It was a time when Art and Patrick were tennis academy besties, animatedly biting each other’s churros. One glimpse of Tashi, then a tennis prodigy well set on her way to superstardom, became the tension rod between the boys. In flashbacks, Challengers reveals how Tashi toys with them, letting them compete for her on and off the court, briefly unlocking the sexual tension that has evidently always been there. She dates Patrick first, but for plot reasons, ends up marrying Art. On the surface, Challengers is interested in the ways that its lead throuple contort their desire for each other into a slippery power struggle. But it comes up mostly short, all build up and no pay off.  

Guadagnino has said that he finds watching tennis boring (he is right), and for most of Challengers there is little interest in the sport itself or in making it visually exciting. It is not until the very last moments of the film that the tension and camera accelerate to dizzying levels. Fed up with realism, the athletic aggression, emotional history and sexual tension between Patrick and Art culminates in a rabid montage of sweating faces, tensing calves and ball’s-point-view shots that makes Tashi (and myself) finally perk up in her seat. 

Guadagnino’s films have always been interested in bodies in different states of desire: in I Am Love (2009), it’s the illicit affair between an isolated rich housewife and a chef; Call Me By Your Name (2017), concerns the all-consuming first love affair of teenage Elio with an older graduate student; and, in Bones and All (2022), it’s the tentative coming together of two monsters, two young cannibals on the run. His films have excelled at cinematic foreplay, filling the frame with violent desire and painfully extending the prelude to a first kiss. He pulls off the same trick in Challengers. Both Patrick and Art want Tashi, while she wants to be the best. She prods and clarifies the tension between them with a kiss. In the viral moment, the young athlete sits between the two eager boys,  kisses each one of them in turn, and then leans back, removing herself from the entanglement to observe the two lost in themselves. “The kiss is always a very dangerous moment,” he said about Bones and All. In Challengers, the kiss is a display of Tashi’s dominance and the beginning of the break in Art and Patrick’s relationship. A kiss intertwines them all.

The film is, or intends to be, built around Zendaya’s star power. In a film culture severely lacking in interesting faces, strong personalities and movie star potential, Zendaya is one of the few young actresses who seem to possess all three. She has mastered the red carpet (in partnership with her long-time stylist Law Roach, who she’s been working with since 2011). She made her name on television: first as a child star on Shake it Up and K.C. Undercover, and later on broke through playing teenage drug addict Rue on Euphoria. On the big screen, however, she has mostly been cast as the girlfriend: snarky M.J. to Peter Parker in the Spider-Man films, capable Chani to dessert messiah Paul Atreides in Dune, vulnerable trapeze artist Anne to Zac Efron’s wannabe circus-man in The Greatest Showman, the beleaguered girlfriend of a narcissistic filmmaker in Malcolm & Marie. In these supporting roles, she mastered the look of dignified hurt, of making her presence palpable in only a few scenes. Zendaya has always pulled us into her. She never disappears into a role, she shapes it around her. Challengers demands more of her. Tashi is her first leading role, and it is designed to be an arrival and a confirmation of a new movie star.

But Zendaya can’t quite grasp the bitterness of a tennis prodigy whose promising career is derailed by an injury. There are only hints at the anger of that power Tashi yielded so effortlessly dissipating, of being forced to watch others play, the resentment of moulding someone else’s career while being reminded of what yours could’ve been, the enjoyment she gets of controlling Art’s career as his coach. I can see that it’s written, but I don’t feel it in her performance. Zendaya is undeniable – but the film never lets go of “Zendaya” long enough to give us “Tashi”. Perhaps Tashi’s rough edges, the most fascinating ones, are too ugly to embody at this stage in her ascent to full movie stardom. Challengers cannot afford to lose out on a good fit in order to believably sell us that Tashi is a professionally, sexually and emotionally frustrated mother in her early thirties. Or that her ambition curdles into resentment towards Art, who has become a tennis champion on a losing streak and possesses none of that fire that Tashi had. The film hints at, but never develops, that their partnership is built not on love or lust, but on Art seeking out humiliation to propel him and Tashi’s desire to humiliate him in order to soothe herself. Neither does it disclose why Patrick’s athletic prowess and charm has underserved him so badly that he’s begging for food and banging Tinder dates so he can sleep in a bed instead of his car. Even with Art’s career on a downward spiral, and Patrick’s never having taken off, both of them are still circling around Tashi as though she is their centre of gravity. The film wants us to think that her interest can make or unmake them. She must remain, at least superficially, in power.  

But what power does she actually yield? I found myself frustrated by the Challenger’s refusal to scratch deeper into the spiky mess of desire and ambition that unfolds between the three leads. None of the characters are granted interiority, only hints at one. Does Tashi settle on Art because she blames Patrick for her injury? Does Art move from Patrick to Tashi because he needs a Domme to order him about? Does Patrick keep coming back to Tashi as a way to keep circling Art? Would they all be happier if they just fucked?  

Challengers’ entire publicity campaign hinges on sexual tension so rabid it would make any screen wet. And the downright feral reaction to it online (NSFW for most of its Letterboxd reviews) proves that it has worked to some degree. But it left me, ultimately, feeling cold. Challengers only comes alive when Art and Patrick are competing with one another, on the court or in conversation (or when Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s throbbing score comes in, often mixed so strangely that it overpowers the dialogue). The match that starts and ends the film is violent, rousing and thrilling to watch. So much so that I could (almost) forgive how long it took to get to it. There is, finally, something that inflames them. I get it: tennis is fucking and fucking is tennis. But Challengers never lets any of its characters win, or get off. They are suspended in an exhausting cycle of tension-building. Are our screens so sex-starved that we will accept sparks when we crave fireworks?

You might not know the name “David Dastmalchian” off the top of your head, but you’ll recognise his face. 

He’s the giggling henchman in The Dark Knight. The twitching, would-be child kidnapper in Prisoners. The morose superhero whose skin erupts in a glowing polka-dot rash in The Sucide Squad. He is the trembling patient at the start of The Boogeyman. More often than not, he is the scene-stealer in films full of memorable scenes. His domain is the quiet before the shitstorm. 

There is an unblinking, angsty strangeness to all of Dastmalchian’s performances that make him notable. He’s That Guy. But in Late Night with the Devil, he finally graduates into his first leading role. Here, he plays Jack Delroy, host of the fictional Night Owls (would watch), a popular late-night show that’s perennially second to Johnny Carson. Faced with dwindling ratings, Delroy and his producer set up an interview with an (allegedly) possessed girl, hoping it’ll boost ratings and save them all from cancellation (or damnation). A cracker of a premise for a hybrid found footage film that uses the form not as a budget-friendly structural solution but as a key part of the storytelling.

Whatever gripes I have with the film – the use of AI-generated imagery, the exposition dump via montage – are minimal in comparison to the glee of seeing what Dastmalchian can do when he’s given a bigger playground. Late Night with the Devil is a fittingly surreal affair where his character is tasked to exist between personality and personhood. The figure of the late night host has to be all things and nothing, all at once. Friendly and convivial but with an edge. Inviting, but never cloying. Goofy, but not stupid. The host lives and dies on fabricating the illusion of being friend to all, yet remaining a radically neutral figure, never playing favourites. Dastmalchian is that rare breed of character actor that is recognisable without needing to be a peacock, and he imbues Jack Delroy with that same ability. 

Late Night with the Devil’s clever conceit blends the promise of live spectacle and the supernatural. Everyone on Night Owls is a character of extremes, near-caricatures of the recurring figures of the Satanic Panic. Outside of Dastmalchian, the rest of the cast are tasked with operating on a hammier level, fully embedded in the dual hyperrealities of a bygone era of live TV and horror filmmaking. There’s the unfunny sidedick Gus (Rhys Auteri), the aggressively skeptical hypnotist Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), the ludicrous medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) and, as the Night Owl pièce de résistance, the parapsychologist and her demonically possessed patient Lilly (Ingrid Torelli). Everyone is game, and the game is horror camp. 

Even surrounded by all this excess (Psychics! Hypnotism! Worms! Sexual tension! The Devil!), Dastmalchian never breaks away from the late night host’s unnatural neutrality. The film abandons the found footage device on occasion, giving us a glimpse of behind-the-scenes shenanigans, and although in these moments the film betrays its own internal logic, it’s also where Dastmalchian’s craft is most evident. His voice shifts, losing its authoritative tone and measured pauses. In black-and-white, Delroy is not an ambitious TV star but a man grief-stricken and dismayed at how these unexplainable occurrences are reviving memories of his recently-deceased wife. In these moments, Delroy is shifting between being a Person and being Number One, whether it’s possible to be both. Dastmalchian has always made the most out of small moments, and in Late Night with the Devil, he does it again. 

This Is Me… Now is JLo’s self-funded epic, released last night on Prime Video. It’s a not a movie in the traditional sense of the term as much as it is a gateway into a mind that has imploded onto itself. A glimpse into what happens when you have so much money it wraps any leftover editorial sense in a wad of cash and sets it on fire with a solid gold lighter encrusted in diamonds.

I braved This Is Me… Now, all sixty-five minutes of it, and these are all the thoughts I had watching it. Buckle in.

1. Not the fairytale bookend, ma’am. I’m down for romanticising your own life to stave away the everyday pull of despair and despondency, but this is too much.

2. What sign is JLo? (Leo.)

3. Driving through a lake doesn’t seem safe, tbqh.

4. And - oop - it’s not. The vaguely Ben Affleck-looking fella is gone. That’s why you should wear a helmet.

5. Sexy space factory/jail! Where everyone is imprisoned for being too… romantic?

6. The giant steampunk heart is gonna break and it must be saved through the healing medium of dance.

7. Trauma dance. (Make sure you mention the word trauma at least tenfold.)

8. Why is there mud in this factory? Doesn’t seem sanitary.

9. When I was a kid we used to do Spice Girl dance routines in the playground and honestly, it wasn’t far off from this choreo.

10. Damn, JLo has incredible shoulders. We’ve spent twenty years talking about her ass but should’ve been paying attention to the definition on those boulders.

11. “We all got superpowers”. Only those of us with personal trainers, ma’am.

12. Respectfully, this task seems to be above JLo’s petal factory worker pay grade.

13. Is this the same rose from The Beauty and the Beast?

14. “Scientific study confirms the existence of soulmates”. Show me your workings, movie scientists.

15. I mostly did my therapy sessions in sweatpants, but then I guess that’s why I’m not JLo.

16. BENJAMIN!! NOT THE BLONDE WIG!!

    

17. Ask me to show you a man who truly loves a woman, and I’ll show you a screenshot of Ben Affleck in a blonde wig and a fake nose.

18. In this world, both aliens and astrology is real.

19. I’d wear this rope-corset situation, no questions.

20. My boyfriend once told me that he went through a phase where he wanted all his furniture to be made out of glass. JLo is living his dream.

21. Glass houses, geddit?

22. It takes a lot of trust for a couple to have a fully glass bathroom.

23. “Fuck Libras.”

24. “The Zodiacal Council” is the next stage of evolution for the horoscope girlies.

    

25. Jane Fonda, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Trevor Noah, Neil deGrasse Tyson are the Zodiacal council… but why did Matthew McConaughey not make a cameo?

26. What dirt does JLo have on Jane Fonda that she convinced her to do this?

27. Where the Capricorn and Aquarius representatives?

28. None of these men are hot enough for JLo, I’m sorry. Cast better himbos.

29. This little thieving subplot… I’m into it. It’s the only piece of characterisation given to any of the members of the JLo friend group.

30. I wouldn’t complain about this level of open-bar, to be frank.

31. Once again: none of these men are hot enough for her.

32. If her closest friends who disapprove of her grooms are not involved in the wedding at all, are they really that close?

33. I’ve decided all these grooms are AI-generated. They are simply too generic-looking to be real people.

34. “Being with you feels like home. But I left home for a reason.” MADAM. This is a twenty-million-dollar PRODUCTION, not a diary with a toy golden lock.

35. Wait, is she leaving their houses? She moved in with them? In a film with a giant petal-operated heart, the most unbelievable thing is that Jennifer Lopez would ever move into an AI-generated himbo’s house.

36. Who are these people? What are their names? Wait, what is her name?

37. She’s a sex addict but we’ve seen zero sex so far.

38. I’m deducing that JLo loved Coda purely because of Paul Raci’s presence here.

39. Fire this fucking therapist for picking up his phone while his patient is still there. Rude!

40. This sparkly couch is giving me a migraine.

41. The Way We Were (1973) — banger. I’d watch it every day too.

42. What is HER NAME? Why doesn’t she start with that in Love Addicts Anonymous?

43. It’s so convenient that every single one of these sex addicts is a professional dancer.

44. I, much like JLo, also enjoy being wet indoors.

45. There is a matching, monogramed chaise-longe and carpet.

46. Okay, so SHE’s the flower?

47. Is this Sam Rockwell’s house from Charlie’s Angels (2000)?

48. Why doesn’t she date this hot, nameless friend of hers?

49. He’s got a name! Mike? Pfft. I needed something with more pizzazz.

50. She grew up wanting to be a woman in love?

51. What does she actually do?

52. That rude therapist seems both expensive and not very good at his job.

53. Wait, so does this factory make… rose petals?

54. At this point my TV started glitching and for a good minute I thought it was part of the movie.

55. “Magical things” happen in the rain. Like pneumonia.

56. Gene Kelly is trying to crawl out of his grave right to haunt everyone involved in this Singin’ in the Rain scene and for good reason.

57. The woman hurriedly getting into the restaurant behind JLo’s impromptu choreo in the rain… she is me.

58. Sometimes, you should give up, though.

59. Is this Dune? Why are they in the desert again?

60. “This has got to be one of the weirdest things I’ve done in my life”. You and me both, Sofia Vergara.

61. This entire film is a safety hazard.

62. In the credits, Mike is the only one of the friendship group that gets a name. Unclear why.

63. I would’ve given anything to have been a fly on the wall at the friends-and-family screening of this.

64. The lesson here is: sometimes it’s okay to keep your therapy thoughts to therapy.

65. This is celebrity nonsense. This is grandiose cringe. This is a failure so sincere it’s circled all the way back to iconic. I can’t help but love this deeply silly woman.

An oft-quoted piece of advice for writers is to write what you know. What does a lonely person know except loneliness? All of Us Strangers opens on Adam (Andrew Scott), amber flesh reflected against an empty London. He lives in a polite new build, with sharp edges, rich coloured furniture and a humourless reception. Adam’s friends have largely moved out of London to raise kids and be close to their families, while he has neither. Orphaned at twelve, he finds himself alone, eating biscuits and attempting to write a script1. 

Andrew Haigh adapts Taichi Yamada’s 1997 novel Strangers dispensing with the viciousness of the book’s ghosts to distil a much more primal idea: how impossible it feels to solve loneliness. In her book The Lonely City, Olivia Laing writes that there is a “particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of other people”. She is writing about New York, a city she moved to for a man who quickly abandoned their relationship. Adam’s lonely city is London, cold and abstract. His building is empty, or at least it feels empty. David Foster Wallace’s short story The Depressed Person opens asserting that “the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain”. The shapelessness of loneliness is addressed by Laing too. She writes about it as a “state of lack”, a state of being defined by a sharp absence, something “difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise.” What to do then, except to stay quiet.

I bring up Wallace’s story because it gets to its vicious point very quickly: the cyclical, self-cannibalising experience of being depressed. It’s easier, it seems, to write about feeling something. Much harder to write about, let alone visualise, the experience of a void, which All of Us Strangers does elegantly, holding loneliness in its colours, heartless cityscapes and the faces of its protagonists. And reflections, everywhere, as reminders of its protagonist’s aloneness.

When visiting his parents’ old house on a whim, or perhaps to seek writerly inspiration, Adam finds them alive. Memory and reality collapse into one another when he meets his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell), aged and dressed and sounding the same as they did the year they died, preserved, as they were when Adam was a kid, and made flesh once more. Back in their house, in his childhood home2, the illusion of fullness is so seductive for a lonely person. All of Us Strangers doesn’t care much for supernatural explanations, and is all the better for it. Memories are their own ghosts.

No amount of therapy will be able to solve the insurmountable divide between parent and child, neither able to accept the other as a creature independent of oneself. All of Strangers’ most fanciful conceit is the possibility of a conversation of equals between parent and child: painful and true, sometimes full of mutual disappointment. The film, at its most poignant, imagines this conversation as a conduit for the closing of a wound that’s long scarred over. When Adam speaks to his parents, there is a tepid resentment that vibrates just under the surface of Andrew Scott’s performance. How sad and how lovely things can be in the same instant.

Until this encounter, Adam kept his memories in a small box, a litter of photos of the parents never saw him grow up. The structures we are told are antithetical to a lonely life – family, romance, friendship – seemed out of reach. When Harry (Paul Mescal) knocks at his door, boozy and lusty-eyed, it’s no surprise Adam is terrified. In this first meeting in the doorway, they both seem mildly feral, their words scratchy like they haven’t spoken to anyone in months. How to describe an absence? What is its texture? From a lonely perspective, everyone else’s life is full and vibrant and pain-free. Loneliness always feels exclusive to the lonely. While Adam is not depressed, he is resigned. “How do you cope?” Harry asks him, and he doesn’t give an answer because there is none. Adam and Harry, each in their own apartment, which might as well be different planets, incapable of articulating the shape of their lack. Not at first. The only choice available, it seems, is to remain alone, lacking. 

When you find yourself lacking, you try to fill that obsessive emptiness inside. Maybe booze, drugs, sex, or work. People, too. When Harry shows up clutching a bottle of Japanese whisky, the stink of desolation is felt through the screen. He is made up of rough edges, a sketch of a character who would be inaccessible and cold if played by someone other than Mescal, who is able to map terrible pathos onto Harry’s jittery, needy movements. Harry, though younger than Adam, is weighed by a similar shame, that of not mattering. Neither of them blame anyone in particular for their feelings of un-belonging. Crushingly, they just accept it.  In a Q&A, Paul Mescal described his character as having “a great capacity for love with a great tolerance for his own pain.” Harry is a deeply lonely creature who has become used to dismissing his own importance. One single detail in the film sends me over the edge: Harry’s hand, placed on his own side, hugging himself.

Loneliness sticks to your skin. But one person’s loneliness does not, necessarily, solve another’s. After Adam eventually does let Harry in, literally, into his house, and figuratively, into his life. When they kiss, Adam forgets how to breathe. He needs coaching back into touch, which Harry provides with careful tenderness. Harry’s presence becomes a gateway out of the lack for Adam: his insistence on being present, on talking to and touching him, on asking questions. There are less reflections. Less abstracted, lonely cities. He slowly guides Adam back into feeling things - touch, desire, fun - even when he could not do that for himself. 

Laing writes that loneliness creates a “self-protective amnesia”. That, once no longer lonely, the lonely person won’t be able to remember (or empathise with) loneliness. At the end of All of Us Strangers, Adam is still alone, just like at the start, but he will remember Harry - and he will remember the shape of loneliness.