If you want your movie to be sexy, you hire Luca Guadagnino. He has a real gift for depicting desire on screen, and that gift is on full display in Challengers. Lust is pretty much the primary concern here, the camera spending as much time ogling Zendaya.

She stars as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis star turned coach for her husband Art Donaldson (Faist). Art used to be best friends with Patrick Zweig (O’Connor), until their rivalry over Tashi tore them apart. Now, years since the two men spoke to one another, they find themselves head-to-head in the final of a tennis tournament where years of resentment finally come to a boil.

We spend a lot of the movie jumping back in time, following the events and messy drama that led these characters to where they are today. It all begins with a hotel bedroom encounter involving all three of them, which does a fine job of setting the tone for what follows. This is a movie all about desire, ambition, and hunger, the last one expressed very memorably in an early scene of Patrick, broke and sleeping in his car, staring longingly at another character’s breakfast bagel.

And staring is the order of the day here. One of the earliest scenes, both chronologically and in of when it appears in the film, involves Patrick and Art watching Tashi play tennis, both immediately and hopelessly infatuated with her. In turn, we stare at them through the camera lens while they square off on the court, their chiselled bodies dripping with sweat and the camera all but drooling over them. And completing this ouroboros of desire, Tashi stares directly into the camera itself while she ires the two of them during that hotel liaison.

Guadagnino captures this spectacle of beautiful bodies in motion so brilliantly that, even if it were all Challengers had to offer, it would be hard to complain. He and director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom have cooked up a real feast for the eyes here, particularly during the decisive tennis match between Art and Patrick. Tennis in the movies has a habit of disappearing into a montage of the ball being hit back and forth, with little sense of the drama and momentum of the game.

Not so here, where there’s a real visceral power to each swing of the racquet, helped along to no end by some truly thrilling camerawork. There are daring POV shots where it briefly feels like a first-person shooter video game and an astonishing late-game moment where the camera actually goes inside the tennis ball, bouncing across the court in truly eye-popping fashion. It’s like Mukdeeprom and Guadagnino decided to one-up the bowling-ball-camera from the beginning of The Big Lebowski.

Beyond the visual splendour of it all, there’s a real depth of character here, seriously involving drama powered by actors at the top of their game. To call them “complicated” would be kind, and “poisonous” probably more accurate: they’re a fascinating trio, each needing the others but also clearly better off without them. O’Connor and Faist give these badly wounded former brothers connection, love and hatred mingled in equal measure, while Zendaya takes a difficult, potentially extremely unsympathetic part and makes it look effortless. These are proper movie-star performances from all three of them, and while Zendaya has and deserves top billing, they’re all sensational.

Challengers continues Guadagnino’s recent winning streak with aplomb, and while it might not overall be quite as good as Bones And All, it makes up for that with a truly brilliant ending that blows that of his cannibal opus out of the water. And like Bones And All, it makes a great date movie: you’ll have plenty to talk about afterward, and no matter your orientation, you’ll get more than your fill of eye candy. Go ahead and stare. The camera invites you to.