Challengers may well come to be seen as one of the most significant moments in a growing movement to relibidinse cinema again now that the stranglehold of Marvel has passed. First and foremost, this means reinvesting cinema with a sense of presence, eventfulness, and singularity, and director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes achieve this by way of a film that largely revolves around a single event – a match at the ATP Challenger Tour between grand slam champion Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and low-circuit player Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). This match gathers the intensity of a fifteen year friendship and professional relationship, and has been organised by Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art’s wife, Patrick’ ex-girlfriend, and a rising tennis star before injury forced her into a coaching role for Art.

In other words, Challengers revolves around an event of enormous physical, sexual, romantic and cognitive momentousness, and the aesthetic of the film mirrors this in many ways. On the one hand, this is an intensely cerebral movie, suffused with an intense mental energy and a pensive quiet behind the scenes. Nobody ever quite stops thinking about tennis and nothing is ever quite outside the ambit of the central game. In the later parts of the film, this heightened presence, or prescience, is given visual and sonic form as a windstorm that gusts and billows around the characters, providing them with a canvas upon which to project, and a shroud within which to conceal, their deepest fantasies of each other. The screenplay, too, traffics in epic pronouncements – “it wasn’t even like tennis – it was a totally different game,” “we were in love or we didn’t exist” – that add a conspicuous wordiness and writerliness to the film’s already intense metaphysics of presence, compounding the sense of its eventfulness by drawing continuous and emphatic attention to Guadagnino’s auteurist address.

However, as most critics have noted, and as the film’s own promotion indicates, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes’ effort to relibidinse cinema is most dramatically bound up in the relationship between the three leads. Two different yet related forms of sexual swagger come into play in this respect. On the one hand, Challengers is suffused with an 80s sense of occasion, a vision of the tennis player as a human machine, and tennis itself as a synthily propulsive state of mind. By extension, the film traffics in the freewheeling sexuality of 80s frat comedies – the buddy homosociality of doubles partners going for the same girl, one of them (Patrick) the archetypal alpha jock and sex object, the other (Art) the archetypal nice guy and husband material. The transgressive horizon of these 80s frat films, which were conservative at heart, was typically a threesome, a sex act that gave expression to the anarchic homosociality of the genre but also contained it within a nominally heteronormative venue.

By contast, Challengers pairs this 80s libidinality with a more contemporary sense of queer, polymorphous and emergent sexualities – and the threshold between 80s and 20s sexuality is in itself part of the frisson of the film. No sooner do Art and Patrick meet Tashi than they ask for her number, and no sooner do they ask for her number than she encourages them to confess to the sheepish sex acts they’ve performed with or for each other, before she pulls back from a three-way kiss to watch the two men making out with satisfaction. From this point onwards, the film defies the paranoid distinction between straight and gay that was so central to the 80s frat comedy. Not only are Art and Patrick as eroticised as Tashi, but the film as a whole brims with a queer ambience that it positions as inherent to male athleticism, even or especially in its most heteronormative mode. From the queer announcer who oversees the central tennis match, a cipher for Guadagnino’s own directorial touch, to the plethora of casual gym nudity, some of it from the two leads, to the awry rituals that see Art and Patrick press chests and then spit gum into each others’ hands before a tennis warmup, the film disperses the sexual intensity of the frat comedy into its own sentient mise-en-scenes. Desire becomes ambient, every gaze exudes polymorphous possibilities, and the three main characters become exhilaratingly open-ended in their pleasure-principles.

All of that means that Challengers generates more desire than it knows what to do with, making for a narrative structure that oscillates between feeling underdetermined and overdetermined, a welcome respite from a Marvel milieu whose capitalist realism dictates that nothing can be surprising, nothing can exceed the franchise, and no desire, whether of character or audience, can remain in an emergent and polyvalent state. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way Guadagnino revises, or perhaps more accurately discards, the sexual trope of the threesome, and the romantic trope of the love triangle. For the originality of Challengers is to present us with a genuine throuple, a relationship that can’t be reduced to a love triangle because nobody is really in the middle. The best approximation the film can give is the synergy between tennis players – specifically, the synergy between three tennis players, all on the court at the same time, but continually oscillating between one awry doubles-singles standoff after another. None of the characters here make sense or feel complete without the other two, and no pairing of them make sense as a discrete couple either. Moreover, all three of them sense this throuple potential from their first meeting, but especially Tashi, who needs Art and Patrick to demonstrate their latent queerness before she can seriously engage with them as her prospective partners.

Hence the primary orientation of the film – each member of the throuple swivelling their head from side to side, watching and calibrating their desires against the other two members of the relationship, like the tennis match that anchors the narrative. By the time this match occurs in the timeline, Tashi has largely fallen out of touch with Patrick and has long been married to Art, so by organising the standoff she hopes to restore the competition to their friendship, and use that competition to generate the homoeroticism needed for the three of them to function as a throuple once again. Hence, too, the odd combination of underdetermined and overdetermined narrative moments, since Tashi seems to get almost no pleasure from Art and Patrick individually, but lives for those moments when the three of them are syncing in perfect harmony. This precarious and precious sense of the participants of a relationship finally getting in sync was once the province of the classic 90s romcom, but in a post-romcom era it takes three people for that fragile beauty to make itself felt – and the result is to reinfuse romantic cinema with an eroticism that has been all but lost in an era of sexless superhero franchises and ultra-graphic exercises in sexual demystification.

In the end, then, Challengers is not exclusively interested in throupledom as an end in itself but as a means to a (cinematic) eroticism that is emergent by its very definition, dependent on fugitive moments of personal and physical communion that are both as effervescent and iconic as the endings of the best Hollywood romcoms. And the ending here is beautifully poised, so calibrated in fact that it doesn’t even feel like a conclusion so much as a distillation of the quintessence of the film itself. As all the burnished physicality, slo-mo lyricism and close-up minutiae of the male body finally finds its catharsis, the point-of-view shots of Art and Patrick start to intertwine, the two men leap into each others’ arms at the net, and Tashi screams, laughs and claps in the audience, having restored, in this moment, the homosocial rapport between them, and accordingly the quantum of queerness needed for the throuple to exist again – even or especially as all three of them are separated and united by the threshold-infrastructure of the tennis court itself (the net for Art and Patrick, the stands for Tashi and the men). This ability to evoke romantic, libidinal and sexual gratification that stems from but also stands outside the time and space of the film is the hallmark of the best romantic comedies, a genre Guadagnino might just have revived with this extraordinary release.