As I grow older I find myself becoming more charitable to certain movies. If a film does three really interesting things, even if it’s a bit of a mess, that’s functionally a good movie in my book. By that metric, Luca Guadagnino’s tennis drama Challengers is a good movie, if only because the entire soundtrack sounds like some PlayStation 1 shit and goes harder than I could ever imagine.
I’m not going to do a full review of Challengers, because enough people have done that, but I will summarize a few things for context. Challengers is a movie about a tennis champ named Art Donaldson (played by Mike Faist), who has been stuck in a losing streak. His wife and coach Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) convinces him to participate in a smaller tournament to knock him out of his rut, knowingly pitting him up against her former boyfriend and his former best friend from boarding school, Patrick Zweig (played by Josh O’Connor), a now hard-on-his-luck, D-tier tennis player who lives out of his car and goes on Tinder dates to find a warm bed to sleep in. The rest of the movie is a nonlinear exploration of the deterioration of that friendship as the two butt heads over Tashi, as well as the sudden collapse of Tashi’s career, ultimately leading to the two reuniting for one final match.
Though the script itself is quite solid and written by Justin Kuritzkes, AKA the Potion Seller guy from that one YouTube video, the movie as a whole is largely uneven. Luca Guadagnino, who directed Call Me By Your Name and the inadvisable remake of Suspiria, is an inconsistent director in his output, and Challengers no exception. It’s strangely blocked and shot and bizarrely paced. Much was made of this movie being aggressively horny prior to its release, but if anything it’s the opposite — an exploration of how cold, bloodless and sexless rich or upwardly mobile people can be. These people only feel alive doing one thing, playing tennis, which is ultimately sold by the best part of the entire movie, the soundtrack.
This soundtrack fucking rules, man. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are consistently good at what they do (the soundtrack the 2023 Ninja Turtles movie was particularly slept on), but Challengers is an entirely different beast. The music that scores any of the scenes where characters are playing punishing, body-destroying tennis sounds like aggressive mid-90s techno that you would hear on a particularly cool PlayStation game.
If you have ever voluntarily listened to the soundtrack to Wipeout 2097, the soundtrack to the Ghost in the Shell game (Takkyū Ishino’s Megatech Body), Soichi Terada’s work on Ape Escape (which just got a vinyl release as Apes In The Net), or even something like Hotline Miami or Neon White, you will feel immediately at home with Reznor and Ross’ work on Challengers.
When I think of video games being “cool” in a meaningful way, I think of the PlayStation, as a specific era of both gaming culture and electronic music. There is nothing cooler in my mind than Jonny Lee Miller going into a club in Hackers and playing an early pre-vis version of Wipeout on a wall of TVs against Angelina Jolie set to blistering techno. Culture peaked there, and despite some notable exceptions it’s mostly been downhill since.
What makes the Challengers soundtrack so special is the realization that we can just pick up from that moment any time we like. Like OPN’s work on the Uncut Gems soundtrack, tracks like “Brutalizer” and “Match Point” take an otherwise staid indie drama about rich weirdos and accelerates it at a jarring pace. Every single time I found myself asking “do I like this movie?”, I would be presented with wildly disorienting shots of tennis accompanied by pounding, aggressive club beats, and immediately be back in.
It’s not even that it’s a perfect soundtrack. Being a soundtrack, interstitial pieces like “Final Set” and “Lullaby” are easily skipped. The track that plays over the credits, “Compress/Repress” is much more in line with Reznor’s popular work, featuring vocals from him as well, but it’s clearly weaker than the rest of the album. But on the whole the Challengers soundtrack is a good enough soundtrack to listen to in my spare time, and I can’t say that for most movie soundtracks. What’s more, they also released an entire remix album with German producer Boys Noize, which rearranges the entire thing into one contiguous set. You can absolutely lift weights to this music.
Challengers is a fine movie, more successful than it isn’t, and it functionally didn’t change my option of Luca Guadagnino as a director one way or the other. But as a case study in how to immediately elevate your movie, it’s flawless. And why stop there? Set Beauty and the Beast to Acid House. Sprinkle some Drum and Bass in an otherwise forgettable micro budget indie release. Just surprise me. It’s your movie, it isn’t illegal, and there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from making the whole thing sound like Wipeout.
