Challengers Ending Explained: Who Wins in the End?

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor, this compelling movie is bold, honest, and leaves viewers reflecting on its ending.

The film, which includes flashbacks and hidden feelings, reaches its peak during a tense match between childhood friends Art and Patrick. They compete for a win that means more than just the score. However, the real victory, the film suggests, is something different.

This remarkable movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor, is bold, honest, and leaves viewers thinking about its ending.

The film, filled with flashbacks and unspoken emotions, reaches its peak during a high-stakes match between childhood friends Art and Patrick, competing for a win that goes beyond just the score. However, the real victory, the movie suggests, is something different.

What the movie is about?

In Challengers, Tashi, a former tennis player turned coach, watches her husband Art, a once-successful professional, struggle in a slump.

Wanting to reignite his passion, she enters him into a low-level “Challenger” tournament, expecting easy wins. But her plan starts to fall apart when Art faces his estranged childhood friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend, Patrick, whose career has fallen into mediocrity.

This unexpected reunion brings their complicated past to the forefront, showing a history filled with close friendship, youthful dreams, romantic feelings, and hidden betrayals.

As the movie moves between past and present, Challengers looks at how fragile male friendships can be, especially when driven by competition, ambition, and a shared love for the same woman.

The flashbacks also reveal the sacrifices Tashi made when an injury ended her promising tennis career and how Art cared for her and eventually married her. But her feelings for Patrick never faded, and their love triangle became more complicated.

The main focus of the movie leads to the intense match between Art and Patrick. This match goes beyond just being a game—it turns into a raw, physical fight with their past that they can’t escape.

In the final moments, they are playing a tiebreaker, exchanging points back and forth.

How does the movie end?

Director Luca Guadagnino chooses to leave the ending of Challengers open, not showing the final point of the match.

Art, fueled by a discovery of past betrayal, releases his anger on the court. Patrick, seeking redemption, fights back. The tension builds as Art reaches for one last shot, crashing into Patrick in a tangle of limbs, diving over the net and into his arms.

This isn’t just a tennis move; it represents their complicated bond. It symbolizes the rejoining of their friendship.

Their embrace can be understood in different ways, but it suggests a long-awaited forgiveness. After years apart, Art and Patrick might be finding a connection again, one that began when they were younger and played tennis together.

Of course, this could be more complicated since Tashi recently slept with Patrick, but maybe not. Tashi adds something extra to the ending. Is her excited cheer a sign of renewed passion for the game, or is it because of the raw emotion on display during the match?

Her future with Art is unclear. She respects him as a father but wants him to want to play tennis, something that was taken away from her. In the final scene, they are finally talking to each other, not with words, but through the game that first brought them together.

Whether Art wins or Patrick makes a comeback doesn’t really matter. The ending of Challengers is about forgiveness, a small step toward healing old wounds. And maybe, that’s the most satisfying win of all.

Guadagnino said he kept the winner unclear on purpose: “I needed to get this very, very visually amped up and really immersed for the audience to understand how much it meant for them not to win over the other, but to be back together, all of them.”

The question of who Tashi chooses at the end is something the audience thinks about too.

The writer of the movie, Justin Kuritzkes, told Indie Wire, “I chose to end the movie where I ended the movie, and I chose to end it there because, for me, the movie is over. For me, what’s going on with these people has been resolved in some way that’s satisfying enough for me. And I always want to start a movie as late as possible and end a movie as early as possible. So for me, I got what I needed by then, and I feel like they did too.”

Challengers is a film that sticks with you, like the echo of a well-hit ball. It doesn’t give easy answers, choosing to explore the complexities of human connection and the weight of the past.

Whether Art or Patrick won the match doesn’t matter as much as the journey they took to get there, a journey that may change the way their tangled relationship with Tashi works forever.