The Electrifying Ending of 'Challengers,' Explained

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This article contains spoilers for the ending of Challengers.

When Justin Kuritzkes was writing Challengers, he adhered to the following philosophy about beginnings and endings: "I always want to start a movie as late as possible, and end a movie as soon as possible." In other words: throw your viewers right into the action with minimal buildup, then pull them out as soon as the story has reached its inevitable conclusion. With Challengers, he says, "I always wanted the ending to feel a bit like a punch of energy."

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor, Challengers is a sweaty, sexy sprint through the world of professional tennis. It's framed around a seemingly low-stakes tournament match between Art Donaldson (Faist) and Patrick Zweig (O'Connor), childhood friends who have spent the last decade-plus tangled in a love triangle with former tennis prodigy Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), who is now Art's wife and coach. Kuritzkes's script frequently travels back in time to show the full arc of the three players' careers, from Art and Patrick's teenage infatuation with the incandescent, hyper-competitive Tashi to her career-ending knee injury and pivot to coaching.

Kuritzkes was a "completely mediocre" tennis player as a kid, but became an obsessive tennis fan after catching the 2018 US Open final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka. He'd been asking himself how one could improve the already "perfect experience" of watching tennis and decided it would be knowing, at every moment, exactly what was at stake for the players. "I wanted to drop us right into a tennis match, and then gradually understand why it was so important," he says. "I personally was excited when I had the first image of these three people at this nothing tournament. Why are they all so invested? Why are they all looking at each other like this is a Grand Slam?"

Tashi can't play tennis anymore, but she is effectively playing this match through the two men, who are forever in her gravitational field. Patrick is broke and wants Tashi to become his coach, while Art doesn't seem to have his heart in the game anymore. Gradually, we learn that his wife has given him an ultimatum: Win this match, or she's leaving him.

During Art and Patrick's match, the three communicate silently, an idea Kuritzkes picked up while watching the 2018 final between Williams and Osaka. During that match, Williams received a code violation after her coach appeared to give her signals from the sidelines. "Because I was not very keyed into tennis, I had never heard of that rule. But it struck me as intensely cinematic. You're all alone on the court, and there's this one other person who cares as much about what happens to you as you do—but you can't speak to them. What if you really needed to talk about something?" says Kuritzkes. That dynamic became the seed of Challengers, which he wrote on spec over three months in 2021.

Even before Kuritzkes started writing, he had one of the movie's final images in mind. In a brilliant moment of nonverbal communication, Patrick pauses at the baseline, then imitates Art's habit of touching the ball to the throat of his racquet before serving. Tashi doesn't know what's going on between the two men, but the audience does: When Patrick and Tashi date as teenagers, he's coy about whether they've slept together yet. Art playfully tells Patrick to mimic his serve if he and Tashi have.

The bit isn't so cute now, since it's an admission of marital infidelity. But it's also an expression of the men's intimacy. Kuritzkes thought of Art and Patrick as orphans, shunted off to an elite tennis academy by their well-to-do parents, where they go through puberty together and have crushes on the same girls. The night they meet Tashi, a would-be threesome ends in the two boys making out while Tashi watches, pleased. "I think they understand each other as players better than they understand anybody else," says Kuritzkes. "There's a deep intimacy in that, which is the kind of intimacy you can only have with your best opponent. And they're your best opponent because they know you the best." As a teenage Tashi says of locking into a match with a competitor: "We went somewhere really beautiful together."

In Kuritzkes's mind, the three characters have spent their adult lives trying to reconnect—"to get back to this moment in their youth when it wasn't so fraught, when there was just a sort of innocent joy in being together." Thinking about real-life tennis matches that he'd watched, he realized that he could make this happen, literally, by having Art and Patrick move up to the net, ratcheting up the speed and intensity of the match. "You can feel an energy in a tennis stadium when one player comes forward and the other player comes forward. Something's going to happen. This can't last. An explosion is going to happen," Kuritzkes says.

In Challengers, the explosion is Art crashing over the net as he reaches for an overhead, and Patrick catching his opponent in a sweat-drenched embrace. Kuritzkes wanted this climactic moment to be satisfying—which it is—but ambiguous. It's not clear who wins the match or what's going to befall the characters next; in his opinion, it doesn't really matter. "There was a lot of discussion about the open-endedness of the final moment in the movie. 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."

Those are the rules: Get in fast, get out fast, and leave your audience vibrating with adrenaline.