There’s a scene in Challengers, the new film directed by Luca Guadagnino, in which Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) tells Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) the small adjustments he can make to cause his tennis serve to move a few miles per hour faster. They’ve known each other for a few years at this point, having met when they were both teenagers on the junior circuit, she a phenom and he a mildly promising player in the shadow of his doubles partner, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). It’s been a while, though, and they’re getting tentatively reacquainted, the heaviness of past history hanging like a fog that makes them uncertain if they’re really seeing each other. They don’t their futures, but the back-and-forth chronology of the film’s narrative means the viewers do. Or at least they know some of it, and the scene, simple as it is, quivers from the strain of bygone conflicts and troubles yet to come pressing in from both sides. It’s not the most dynamic sequence in the film, but it holds all the impish craft, deeply considered character details, and splayed-open emotions that make the film a whirling dazzler.

As a storyteller and visual stylist, Guadagnino needs no coaching in the art of hitting harder. Challengers is a grandly entertaining film that constantly upends itself. In its particulars, Challengers is reasonably simple: It’s a sports movie with a love triangle pinging throughout it. The story spans about a dozen years but packs in so many corkscrew twists — the swirl enhanced by how aggressively it rallies back and forth between different time periods — that is feels like entire, highly complicated lifetimes go by. The screenplay, by Justin Kuritzkes, is smartly, intricately built. It lets details emerge naturally, often withholding pieces of information until the point when they land with maximum impact. That gamesmanship doesn’t shortchange the characters, making them simply tokens moving around the board. The three main roles are layered and vivid, and the performances by Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor meet the test they provide. The inner lives of the characters come through in the dialogue but even more so in the small, subtle beats of the portrayals, often through tells of body language.

Guadagnino’s enduring fascination with the physicality of people onscreen, which was the most striking element of his Suspiria remake, adds to this film’s resonance. There are a lot of scenes that revolve around expressions of desire, and the lean, almost angry athleticism of the tennis players runs through scenes that play out both on and off the court. The camera lingers on the physical scars these people carry, in part because they serve as reminders of the inner wounds that criss-cross their hearts and psyches. They are defined by all their injuries and they did or didn’t overcome them.

In addition to its impressive depth of feeling, Challengers is an amazing piece of cinematic craft. Guadagnino is not particularly delicate in the assemblage of his moviemaking pieces. The film hurtles along with every choice announcing itself: the crackling edits of Marco Costa, the riveting sound design that conveys key information (the booming sound of Tashi’s racket strikes compared to muted thump of her opponents), and especially the overtly present score of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Narrative turning points come crashing in as if borne by typhoon-level winds. This sort of florid insistence can set a film awry if a director doesn’t know how to wrangle it into place. Careening around within this tonal bravado is where Guadagnino is most clearly at home. He knows that sometimes delivering a winner demands taking a big swing.