Though tennis has never rivaled football or American football in cinematic representation, its screen presence is often remarkable. In cinema, tennis is rarely just a sport—it is a stage. The court becomes an emotional laboratory, a space for bodily control and desire, a figure of rivalry, but also of collapse. In 2024, with Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and the series Apples Never Fall, tennis makes a comeback—speaking more about the contemporary world than many a political film.
What Does Cinema Seek in Tennis?
While tennis has never garnered as much cinematic attention as football or boxing, in recent years it has increasingly become an arena for psychodrama—a field of desire, domination, and intimate combat. This is no accident: tennis is a sport of soloists, akin to a duel, brimming with tension, where emotions concealed beneath white attire erupt with every exchange. From Hitchcock to Guadagnino, directors have recognized not only the aesthetics of movement but also its metaphorical potential: the court as a stage for crumbling relationships, pulsating eroticism, and self-conflict. Unlike team-sport cinema, tennis films offer claustrophobic intimacy—the camera tracks the body, breath, and pulse. In 2024, through Apples Never Fall and Challengers, tennis gains a new cinematic identity: the sport becomes not just a backdrop but a language through which characters express emotional tension, hidden traumas, and fantasies. So, what does cinema reveal about us when it gazes at a tennis match?
Tennis and the Camera: The Aesthetics of Solitude and Intimate Violence
Unlike team sports, tennis is a spectacle centered on the individual—their physicality, rhythm, and inner chaos. For the camera, this is an ideal setup: one player, one body, one space confined by the court’s lines. This isolation makes tennis perfect for cinema seeking emotional tension and formal experimentation. In Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Bruno’s static gaze amid a moving crowd symbolizes blackmail and psychological terror. Antonioni’s Blow-Up goes further, depicting a tennis game without a ball, a silent gesture of simulation that suspends the viewer between reality and illusion, image and imagination. Guadagnino’s Challengers pushes boundaries further—the camera doesn’t just follow the players; it dances with them, rises, touches. Point-of-view shots from the ball’s perspective, extended slow-motion, flickering editing, and the pulsating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross create a sense of physical, almost erotic tension. The court ceases to be a sports arena—it becomes a bedroom, a battlefield, and a theater all at once. “A good game should feel like love,” says Tashi, the film’s heroine, capturing the essence of this choreography of senses and aggression. In tennis, there’s no escape: the player must face their opponent, respond to their moves, confront their will. The cinematic camera, with its capacity for intimacy and voyeurism, turns this sport into a spectacle that is not only physical but emotional. Thus emerges an aesthetics of solitude, where every serve, every shot, is not just a fight for a point but an existential gesture, revealing the truth about the character.
Challengers: Tennis as a Dramaturgy of Desire
In Challengers, Luca Guadagnino crafts not a sports drama but an emotional symphony played out on courts and in bedrooms. Tennis ceases to be an end in itself—it becomes a language for desire, control, and rivalry. The film tells the story of a triangle: Tashi (Zendaya), a former star player turned coach; Art (Mike Faist), her husband and athlete; and Patrick (Josh O’Connor), her ex and rival. Their tennis matches—both sporting and sexual—form a dense web of tensions where the match’s outcome matters less than its emotional intensity. Guadagnino stages tennis as a ritual of closeness and rejection. The camera explores bodies, sweat, and racket strikes as acts of passion. Slow-motion, prolonged shots, close-ups on tense faces transform the match into a theater of intensity. “A good game should feel like love,” Tashi says, her words unlocking the film’s dramaturgy. The final match is not just a sporting climax but the culmination of an emotional triangle—a sexual game without touch, where each point is an exchange of forces, identities, and domination. Challengers subverts sports cinema conventions: instead of victory, we get ambiguity; instead of glorifying effort, an obsession with control and manipulation. Tashi is not a mentor but a conductor of male emotions, turning the match into a spectacle of her influence. Art and Patrick play not just for victory but for her attention, approval, and past. Guadagnino consciously taps into the sport’s erotic potential, transforming the court into a stage of sublimated sex, where every stroke is a gesture of bodily tension. Thus, Challengers makes tennis more than a sport—it turns it into a dramaturgy of desire: a game where the stakes are not titles but identity and emotion. This is cinema where the match becomes a story of who truly desires whom—and who is really playing.
Class and Sport: Tennis as a Space of Power and Its Disintegration
Tennis is a sport deeply marked by class—its history intertwined with elite clubs, white attire, and exclusive codes of conduct. While sports cinema often focuses on football or boxing as arenas of social ascent, tennis increasingly reveals itself as a space for class and ideological tensions. In Battle of the Sexes (2017), Billie Jean King’s match against Bobby Riggs is not just a battle of the sexes but a clash of lifestyles: a patriarchal showman versus a professional athlete fighting for equality and the right to an identity beyond heterosexual norms. The film subtly shows that the game is not just about points but about power over narrative.
Similar class tensions emerge in King Richard (2021), where the story of a father raising future tennis legends Serena and Venus Williams unfolds against systemic inequality. Richard Williams is an outsider who, against white, class-bound structures, brings his daughters into a world reserved for elites. The camera not only tracks the girls’ technical progress but highlights social tensions: disparities in infrastructure access, distrust from the establishment, and racial exclusion. In tennis, more than in most sports, the struggle for access—to courts, money, representation—is starkly visible.
Films like Naomi Osaka (2021) document how media pressure and class-racial expectations can break even the most talented players. Tennis in cinema is thus not just a sport—it’s a space where illusions of neutrality collapse. The court, though geometrically perfect, becomes a stage for social tension and political reckoning.
The Tennis Player in Focus: Resistance, Body, Disintegration
In sports cinema, a woman on the court is more than an athlete—she is a figure of tension between autonomy and objectification. The camera often tracks female players not to showcase their strategy but to immerse itself in bodily expression: sweat, grimaces, racket strikes. Yet this gaze—especially from a male perspective—easily slips into fetishization. In Challengers, Tashi is not just a coach and former star but a projection of male desires: a mediator of their conflict, a catalyst for tension, an object of control and obsession. Yet she is also the director of the entire game. Tashi is an ambiguous figure: strong, determined, defying stereotypes, yet scarred—physically and emotionally. Her body, ruined by injury, erases her sporting future but not her influence. The camera never lets her fade—it tracks her gestures, words, silences; close-ups of her face resemble images from an inner court where a psychological match unfolds. The woman ceases to be a “player”—she becomes a strategist, narrator, and target of male projections, who fight not just for victory but for her recognition. Meanwhile, Battle of the Sexes unmasks the media’s objectification of the female athlete: Billie Jean King battles not only on the court but in the public sphere—for equal treatment, identity, and a body free from sexual spectacle. Similarly, in Naomi Osaka, Garrett Bradley shows how fragile the line is between discipline and symbolic violence when a woman fails to meet expectations—by staying silent, withdrawing, or shutting down. The female tennis player in sports cinema often teeters on the edge of visibility and erasure. Cinema, while fascinated by her strength, is equally eager to portray her disintegration: psychological, social, physical. Yet it is in this fragility—in a body that no longer plays perfectly—that resistance is born. Resistance against success narratives that ignore the cost. Resistance against objectifying gazes. And resistance against the game itself, which is never just a game.
Tennis as Social Compression: A Microcosm of Symbolic Violence
The tennis court seems geometrically neutral, symmetrical, removed from the world’s chaos. But this is an illusion. In cinematic depictions, tennis often becomes a microcosm—a confined stage where social forces clash: gender, race, class, power. It’s a sport demanding not just precision but self-control, humility before rules, and submission to rituals. The camera, capturing a match, sees not only a sporting clash but the disciplining mechanisms embedded in the game’s structure. Every breach of norms—an outburst, an unexpected gesture, a rebellion against the umpire—triggers symbolic tensions. Films like Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale depict family tennis as a field of toxic relationships: violence here is not overt but in glances, intonations, racket strikes aimed more at each other than the ball. Similarly, 7 Days in Hell grotesquely exposes the absurdity of discipline and social pressure, parodying not just the sport but its media portrayal—revealing how the tennis spectacle becomes a carrier of broader cultural obsessions: patriotism, success, hyper-competence. In tennis, every crack in the perfect surface—sweat, a tear, a grimace—is significant. The camera captures not just the game but its social tensions. In film, tennis becomes a lens for symbolic violence—oppression hidden in rules, success, and the audience’s smile. Sometimes it’s silent domination, sometimes open conflict. But always: compression. Social, emotional, cinematic.
Tennis in Anime: The Prince of Tennis and the Myth of Superhuman Technique
At the opposite end of realism lies The Prince of Tennis, a cult anime that transforms the sport into a spectacle of superhuman powers. For viewers steeped in shōnen conventions, Ryoma Echizen’s tennis is not a struggle against an opponent but against the limits of the body itself. Techniques like “Boomerang Snake,” “Black Hole,” or “Split Step” bear no resemblance to reality but perfectly capture the sport’s emotional intensity through the lens of youthful ambition. The anime turns tennis into a myth—not an egalitarian sport but an elite path for the chosen, where each match is a metaphysical clash of forces. The camera doesn’t track the ball’s trajectory but the energy that shatters the court. In this way, Japanese animation reinterprets the sport: not as a field of class or gender but as an initiatory ritual where technique equals spirit. This is an aesthetics not of reality but of imagination—and in its exaggeration, it reveals something authentic: how deeply the desire for victory transcends the body’s limits.
Tennis as Cinema of Late Modernity
Tennis in cinema is not just a sport—it’s a laboratory of late modernity. Instead of team euphoria, we have solitude; instead of clear rules, blurred identities and social tensions. On the court—as on the screen—everything depends on the individual: their strength, discipline, resilience to pressure. But beneath this illusion of individualism pulse fissures—class, racial, gendered. Cinematic tennis becomes a tool for analysis: of intimate relationships (Challengers), social barriers (King Richard), systemic violence (Naomi Osaka), and existential isolation (The Royal Tenenbaums). Tennis cinema is a story of the modern “self”—constrained, controlled, exposed to public view, yet increasingly fragile. The camera, tracking a player on the court, portrays not just an athlete but a human on the edge—physically, emotionally, socially. In this sense, tennis becomes an ideal medium for the contemporary condition: isolated, spectacular, and marked by a longing for failure.
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Michał Chudoliński – comic and film critic, screenwriter, consultant for film screenwriters. He teaches courses on American pop culture at Civitas University. Laureate of the Polish Film Institute Award.
