I was reminded a little bit of The Illusionist and The Prestige by this movie. Like the world of stage magicians, tennis is hardly a battleground where people get hurt and lives destroyed (apart from the wince-inducing ACL injury scene), so any drama to be wrung out of people hitting balls back and forth is done entirely on the part of the filmmaking, not what it's filming.

All of which means I went in figuring that if Challengers was enough to keep me interested it was down to Luca Guadagnino's talent as a director more than anything else. There are only so many shots of balls being hit with dramatic grunts or sweat dripping off furrowed brows in slo mo you can do.

But like both Guadagnino and writer Justin Kurtitzkes no doubt contend, it's not a story about tennis but a love triangle. Told in alternating timelines that move between the present day and flashbacks, it's the tale of two best friends turned enemies and the woman who constantly comes between them.

I can't recount the plot in the order it unfolds because the order of the revelations is what teases the drama out of the tale, and that's done as skilfully as any other element on screen. Tashi (Zendaya) is a young, hot tennis prodigy, and both Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O'Connor), childhood best friends and upcoming champs, fall instantly in love with her.

Years later (as the story begins, in fact), former top seed Art is on a losing streak, and Tashi, now his wife and manager, convinces him to compete in a small local tournament to get his mojo back. It just so happens the match he'll be playing will be against Patrick, from whom he's long since estranged.

The film cuts between the match and a long history of Tashi loving both men in her own way, partly a parable about how yearning and passion can be at odds with the polite surface of married life and partly the idea that we get different things from different people and no single partner can be everything.

But after an initial relationship with Patrick that causes friction between the boys and their eventual falling out, Tashi actually ends up married to Art, shepherding him to the top of the sport and finding herself now watching him face off with his old enemy and her former boyfriend.

As subsequent sequences bring us closer to the present day and the game, the star crossed love gets even more complicated, raising the stakes whenever we cut back to the match.

Despite there being so much tennis, Guadagnino manages to do something different each time, and in ways that actually serve the plot rather than just mix up all the different ways you can depict sport on screen – at one stage the camera actually becomes the ball, slammed back and forth between the two men with such violence it makes you dizzy.

But even though the filmmaking prowess on display does the best possible job it can of showing you the story happening, and the writing does the best possible job of unpeeling the history with a very well designed chronology, I couldn't help but realise a few times that I was watching two guys play tennis.

It also show a very American kind of prudishness. The much talked-about threesome (we all saw both boys leaning in to kiss Zendaya's neck in that pink track suit top in a million articles about the movie) isn't even one, showing about 30 seconds of kissing and that's it.