Zendaya's "gripping" and "engrossing" drama lands new streaming home in the UK

Challengers, the "gripping" and "engrossing" drama starring Zendaya, has found a new streaming home in the UK.

Released in 2024 and directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film follows Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy.

When Tashi tries to revive her husband Art's (Mike Faist) tennis career by entering him in a Challenger event, Art must face his former best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend, Patrick (Josh O'Connor).

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Challengers was added to Mubi on Thursday (1 October). The channel can also be accessed as an add-on on Prime Video,with a seven-day free trial.

A Mubi description of the film reads: "Advantage, Luca Guadagnino. Quenching a cultural thirst for love triangles, our eminent director of desire casts Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist into a fierce game of sporting and sexual rivalry.

"Serving fast-paced action and elite style, this hotly anticipated film is a career grand slam."

Following its release, Challengers proved popular with critics and currently holds an 88% approval rating from 381 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Nightly wrote: "At its core, Challengers is a game of power plays between three people whose messed-up relationships with each other make for intoxicating viewing, even if the movie doesn’t always work. But at least it’s always gripping."

"Challengers is the kind of sexy, engrossing, somewhat twisted romance we don’t see enough of these days, a thrilling film, thrillingly rendered in its layered storytelling expressed in the purest cinematic form," penned Tribune News Service.

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"The film borders on trashy at times, but it’s so much fun that it’s practically indecent," wrote The Observer, while The Chicago Sun-Times called it: "Sweat-drenched and emotionally bruising."

The Globe and Mail said of the film: "This is a startlingly entertaining, erotically charged movie that hits its many targets with a kind of ferocious and crazed accuracy that’ll knock the wind, among other things, right out of you."

"Zendaya shines like a true movie star, and she and co-stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist will blow you away as tennis pros in Luca Guadagnino’s swoony, sexy romantic triangle that finds hilarious and hardcore erotic mischief off the court and on," added ABC News.

Challengers is available to stream on Mubi.

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Harriet is a freelance news writer specialising in TV and movies at Digital Spy. 

A horror enthusiast, she joined Digital Spy after working on her own horror website, reviewing films and focusing largely on feminism in the genre. 

In her spare time, Harriet paints and produces mixed-media art. She graduated from the University of Kingston with a BA in fine art, where she specialised in painting. She also has an MA in journalism from Birkbeck University.