Challengers is a killer love triangle romance that hates love

It's a slow-building marvel that challenges everyone: its characters, on how far they'll go for the film's central theme; its writer, on the division between reality and fiction; and its viewers, on what they personally define as admirable and, conversely, as villainous.

There's his boarding school bedfellow and supposed best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor), a rugged natural superstar who seems immune to every obstacle except his unrelenting self-confidence.

We start at the end, in an ostensibly low-stakes match between mid-30s Patrick and Art — with Tashi watching in the stands — and spend the rest of the film figuring out how we got there.

Like the genre-defining Y Tu Mamá También — about a pair of oversexed adolescents on an impromptu road trip alongside an older woman with poor decision-making skills — Challengers is about control.

From Atonement's youthfully innocent and high-class Briony, to The Reader's and Kung Fu Master'solder women corrupting their much younger loves, there's always a comforting reason inserted to explain or excuse the shift in power.

A similar age to her partners, in the same relative stage of her career and the only non-white character of the bunch, Tashi does not have an ancillary trait to explain how she could dare manage to get one over on the boys.