In Review: 'Challengers,' 'Boy Kills World'

A week filled with rippling muscles includes a three-way love story and a gruesome revenge tale.

Challengers
Dir. Luca Guadagnino
131 min.

As it hops back and forth across a 13-year timeline, Challengers offers a variety of clues as to where we’ve landed chronologically even beyond the on-screen titles, from changes in facial hair and wardrobe to the songs playing in the background. But even without these clues, it would be apparent where the three lead characters are in their lives. In the story’s present—an ostensibly low-stakes 2019 Challenger Tour tournament sponsored by Phil’s Tire Town and held in New Rochelle, NY—they carry themselves with the weight of years that have yet to burden them in their youth. When the three first meet, they talk quickly and freely, unaware or unconcerned with what their words will come to mean the next day, much less a decade-plus down the line. Yet for all the changes brought by the years, in some ways they keep reliving the first night they met and a hotel room three-way make-out session that sent out sparks none had ever felt before.  Directed by Luca Guadagnino and scripted by Justin Kuritzkes (a playwright and novelist making his screenwriting debut), Challengers charts shifts in power and loyalties between its central characters, but also creates the sense that it’s all in an attempt to return to that moment, maybe the last time any of them felt complete.

It’s that later, Phil’s Tire Town-sponsored moment that Challengers uses as its fulcrum point. It’s there that Art (Mike Faist), an elite-if-struggling pro, faces off against Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a journeyman barely holding onto the lower tiers of the professional circuit. But at this moment, at least, they’re seemingly evenly matched, giving it their all as the members of the small crowd pivot their heads to follow the ball from one end of the court to the other. All (shades of a similar scene in Strangers on a Train) but one: Tashi (Zendaya), whose expression suggests the game has a meaning beyond its immediate thrills.

The three have a history that stretches back to that hotel room, where Tashi, then a young tennis phenom, visited them unexpectedly that fateful night. Joking, sort of, that she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker” to Art and Patrick, longtime friends known in the young tennis world as “Fire and Ice” (though the film never definitively answer who’s-who), Tashi plays it coy, promising to give her number to whoever wins the match the next day. She does, but the question of what everyone means to each other remains unresolved even years later at New Rochelle, by which point Tashi, taken out of competition by an injury, has become Art’s wife and coach and Art and Patrick, at first seemingly interchangeable, have become strikingly different men. Or so it seems.

Challengers is a “hot” film in nearly every sense. Guadagnino shoots the match sequences with an intensity that sometimes borders on the comic—sending volleys directly at the viewer and even throwing in some shots from the POV of the tennis ball—and making little distinction between its protagonists’ competitive drive and sexual attraction. When one character asks another to stop talking about tennis mid-lovemaking, it has the effect of a bucket of cold water. It’s also a film of heated emotions. With each new revelation about the past and development in the present, it becomes clear that the flame of youth hasn’t been doused, but just settled into a smolder waiting to reignite. 

But there’s also a coolness to it, too, that only becomes apparent with time. Challengers slowly and deliberately reveals everything riding on the match, more even than Art and Patrick’s careers. As close as it gets to its characters—from their roiling emotions to their beautiful, battle-scarred bodies—it remains at enough of a remove to study them from a distance and never settle into one character’s perspective for long. Only when the climax circles back to the final match does it become clear this balanced approach makes it the rare sports movie that doesn’t encourage a rooting interest, despite the excitement of the action on the court. It’s a film about the game behind the game, one whose progress could never be measured in points. —Keith Phipps

Challengers opens in theaters tonight.

Boy Kills World
Dir. Moritz Mohr
111 min.

Three words about the notion of a deaf-mute martial arts avenger whose inner voice, lifted from a video game, is provided by H. Jon Benjamin: Sign me up. Benjamin is one of the great voice talents alive—Archer on Archer, Bob on Bob’s Burgers—and his natural deadpan, dripping with world-weariness and irony, gives a different flavor to Boy Kills World, an otherwise straightforward pre-fab cult movie about a one-man fight against a totalitarian regime. A piece of narration like his first line, “I’m buried alive, eating stinkbugs,” could come across any number of ways, depending on who’s reading it, but there’s hung-over quality to Benjamin’s reading that’s utterly disarming, as if eating stinkbugs is a Sisyphean task that he’s warily accepted. Now this is the kind of hero that we can get behind. 

But the inspiration mostly ends there. Expanded from a short film by its first-time director, Moritz Mohr, and produced by Sam Raimi (among others), Boy Kills World premiered last year at Midnight Madness at the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s exactly the sort of red meat that gets devoured by a rabid festival crowd but seems a lot less clever upon reflection. Mohr’s hodgepodge of pop-culture influences, from Kill Bill to The Hunger Games to anime, could kindly be called pastiche, but are really more a delivery system for what Alex from A Clockwork Orange called “a little of the old ultra-violence.” There’s a lizard-brain satisfaction to watching it done adequately, as it mostly is here, but the film’s limited ambition and wit chips away at the fun. 

The always-compelling Bill Skarsgård stars as Boy, a chiseled hero who’s seeking revenge against Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the leader of the totalitarian government that killed his mother and sister and left him deaf-mute in the attack. Since childhood, he’s been raised by a shaman (Yayan Ruhian) who has sharpened the martial arts skills that he’ll need to get through the many goons and powerful figures that are propping up Hilda’s government. With an inner voice on loan from his favorite video game, Super Dragon Punch Force 2, and the spirit of his little sister as his guide, Boy infiltrates the regime through “The Culling,” a televised event where dissidents are murdered in a bid to entertain and terrify the public. 

Several recognizable faces turn up as zesty cartoon villains, including Brett Gelman and Michelle Dockery as Hilda’s sniping siblings and Sharlto Copley as the smirking public face of The Culling. For a while, it seems like Boy Kills World might be a parody or even just a comic riff on The Hunger Games, given the similarity between The Culling and the latter’s “The Reaping,” but Mohr only sprinkles a little surreality on top of a grinding succession of melees and Big Boss fights. There’s not much detail invested in understanding how this future-world operates or how it came to be, either, so when dissidents are lashed on television by costumed mascots like “Gary the Goat” and “Captain Frostington,” it’s hard to process as more than strained wackiness. “Do you know how hard it is to get a cereal company to sponsor mass murder?,” says one villain. No, actually we don’t. — Scott Tobias

Boy Kills World opens in limited release tomorrow.