One woman’s quest to watch Challengers without ruining her body clock.

Every Saturday morning, I wake up with a screaming demon inside my head urging me to “Do. Something. This. Weekend.” I run through the possibilities in my head in a defensive mental crouch, reminiscent of that one time I was attacked by magpies in the school gully as a kid.  

People often worry about having something to say about their weekend at work on Monday. With the exception of a phase where I lied about going kayaking, I don’t worry about this. Online, doing nothing is now a scheduled activity called “rotting.” It has an aesthetic that includes a pastel or beige Stanley cup, beige blankets, a Gua Sha stone, candles, and a slicked-back ponytail. It is suspiciously corporate and sanctioned but apparently completely fine. 

When doing nothing is allowed as long as it is colour-coordinated, my concern about “doing something with my weekend” now comes from the more existential suspicion that I am wasting my finite free time, scrolling my life away watching other people rot while everyone else absorbs powerful cultural knowledge or increases their life expectancy by going hiking.

I usually start Saturdays by doing what I tell my husband is “a little relaxing”. It involves scrolling my life away watching Reels. Ads for Scrub Daddies and their posse of wives, the Scrub Mommies, prompt thoughts about cleaning the oven. I have a pact with a friend that means that can be put off. If I die first, she will clean my oven in case the mourners want to heat sausage rolls in it.

Scrolling on, a woman yells at me about getting fifty-fucken-grams of protein out of a sandwich, and I ponder prepping a week’s worth of egg muffins and meatballs. That can be left until Monday when I have truly accepted the inevitability of the week into my heart.

Zendaya then glows at me from my screen, resplendent in yet another outfit described by my favourite fashion bloggers as “tennis drag”. Of all my achievements in April, training my algorithm to make sure I see every single thing from the Challengers press tour might be my crowning glory. 

“WE WILL GO TO THE MOVIES”, I announce. We will see Challengers. That will be our something. The plan is always to go on a Sunday, to an afternoon or early evening session. That’s before the adult witching hour of 7pm on a Sunday night, and after the time you’re saving up to do a fictional something else. I regularly announce this plan on Saturday mornings because it ticks so many “do something” boxes, including the one that says “flake out on this plan”.

For the last two weekends, I have searched for movie times and found a great hole where I swear a five or six o’clock spot on a Saturday or Sunday used to be. Most options to see Challengers for last Sunday were late lunch times and then between 8 and 9pm. I don’t want to step out into the sun after watching a film which, along with Saltburn, is being credited with bringing eroticism back to the cinema, but I can’t start watching a movie at 9pm on Sunday because it is illegal in the great state of my body clock. Others have whispered to me, embarrassed, that they are also struggling to find times to see movies that aren’t the adult equivalent of 3am. I am further convinced that I am not alone in my hunt for the early bird special, based on the sucking in of air through teeth heard around the office when someone says they have tickets for something that starts at 9.30pm.

I actually don’t know a lot about Challengers despite knowing Zendaya wore archival Louis Vuitton to promote the film in Paris. I sometimes still like to kid myself that films can be watched free of the online hype that accompanies them. I know it is a movie about a tennis love triangle starring Zendaya, the guy who played Prince Charles in The Crown, and another guy. It is directed by the man responsible for I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino. All these things seem like good reasons to see the movie. Combined, these things surely make me part of the imagined audience for this film. Combined, these things surely warrant a Sunday 6pm movie session for me and others like me.

Along with being yelled at about protein intake, age seems to come with these self-imposed hard limits that didn’t exist five years ago: there are certain times when things can happen, and there are times they can not. Going to a movie at 6pm on a Sunday is something that can happen. Going to a movie at 9pm on a Sunday is something that can not. 9pm is for sleeping and fear. It is an embarrassing admission, but it’s real. Seeing a zeitgeist film becomes more urgent when faced with such sad realities.

I raised the question of where the early evening movie times had gone with colleagues. One colleague sensibly suggested it’s because it’s an indie film and, therefore, won’t have as many screening times as something like Fall Guy. Maybe I would have known this if I had been less dazzled by Zendaya’s Ralph Lauren and the love triangles and more regularly attentive to other details like what it is about and who has directed it. Maybe I would understand more about the laws of movie scheduling and supply and demand if Zendaya hadn’t skewered tennis balls on the spikey heels of her shoes and knocked me sideways for two days, wondering whether this was good or bad fashion. 

Who, though, is going to the movies at 9pm on a Sunday night? Don’t they have the same rigid rules about time I do? Did I imagine an era where most films had earlier screening times that weren’t lunchtime?  Truthfully, in writing this, I am both plaintively crying into the wind about the lack of early evening movie times, hoping it might find sympathetic ears, and also hunting for the people going to the movies at 9pm on a Sunday night so I may learn their secrets and “get a life”.

A life where my cultural knowledge can be filled by something other than 50 videos of Zendaya wearing things to promote a horny tennis film. A life that involves finally finding out what Challengers is actually about. A life where the magpie demons nagging me to do something can be flipped off with a plan to see a film on a Sunday night.