Who Won In Challengers? Why The Ending Might Be ‘Confusing’ To The Audience
It’s an ending that you’ll love or hate. If you’ve watched the erotic thriller film of the spring, you might be wondering: Who won in Challengers? Well like the love triangle that’s portrayed in the film, the answer is pretty complicated.
The film is directed by Luca Guadagnino and stars Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor, who play tennis players who are quite literally competing for glory and each other’s love. Known as a tennis prodigy, Tashi (Zendaya) ends up having a devastating sports injury that forces her to quit tennis. She’s involved with both best friends from a young age and tennis players Art Donaldson (Faist) and Patrick Zweig (O’Connor), but settles with Art after she breaks up with Patrick when they were doing long-distance. Fast forward a couple years, Art is disillusioned with his tennis career and as his coach, Tashi ends up making him enter a Challengers tournament. To much of their surprise, Patrick also enters and goes up the ranks to play Art. The tournament ends up being a turning point for Tashi and Art’s relationship with Tashi saying that she’ll leave Art if he loses to Patrick.
Speaking with Variety, Zendaya explained how it’s not your typical sports movie. “It’s much deeper,” she said. “Tennis is just a metaphor for a lot of bigger shit. For power. For codependency. They’re using tennis as their device to get these things out of their system. It’s the only way they know how to communicate.”
Challengers Ending Explained
It’s Art and Patrick’s Challengers match—a great one at that point. The boys are sweating and there are plentiful of action shots that reveal the overarching intensity of the game. Patrick teases Art as he subtly reveals that he slept with Tashi using a secret signal that they thought of when they were younger. Art gives his all and tries to spike the ball, but it all climaxes to Art landing in Patrick’s arms in a large hug. Tashi screams from the stands “Come on!” in a fervor like she did when she was still in the tennis game before her injury. But with that, there’s still a question of who broke the tie.
Wait…so who really won at the end of Challengers?
Writer Justin Kuritzkes and Director Luca Guadagnino purposefully made the ending to Challengers ambiguous, so we don’t know who clearly won.
“There was a lot of discussion about the open-endedness of the final moment in the movie,” Kuritzkes told Vanity Fair. “Throughout different points in the process, there was pressure to clarify it, or declare a winner, or to let the audience know what ends up happening to these people,” he says. “I was always pretty militant about the fact that, for me, once all of their cards are on the table, once nobody has anything left unsaid, the movie is over.”
Related: Zendaya’s Challengers After-Party Dress is Tied Together With A Tennis Ball
“They are acting out for 13 years the possibility of going back to that hotel room to find again that beautiful moment of burgeoning desires and innocence,” Guadagnino talked about the full-circle moment to Entertainment Weekly. “And at the same time, to feel at ease with one another, the way they were there. So, throughout the entire arc, that’s what they’re trying to do. And finally, with the rivalry at that heightened level, the triangle finally found itself sitting in the same place, but now on the court.”
What has the cast said about the ending?
During their press tour, the cast was actually super enthusiastic about how different people interpreted the ending.
“That’s the thing: everyone’s right and everyone’s wrong,” Mike Faist told Entertainment Weekly. “The exciting thing about this film is that people are going to have an opinion, and a very visceral one, and one that allows people to have that kind of an exchange where it’s like, ‘I think this,’ ‘No, I think this, and here’s why,’ and they actually are coming out of the theater engaged in a conversation about the story. People are leaving the theater engaged still with the material itself, and that’s in itself the joy for me.”
In an interview with New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan, Zendaya gets why the ending might be “confusing” for audiences, even for those who are the closest to her. “My mom read the ending so different[ly]. My mom is like, ‘She’s pissed because they realize that they don’t need her anymore,’” Zendaya said in an interview excerpt tweeted by Buchanan. “I was like, ‘But I smile a little bit at the end!’”
