Fair Play is now streaming on Netflix.
Fair Play seems, at first, like a tepid erotic drama about a finance power couple keeping their engagement a secret. However, once it finds its footing, it spirals into a vicious thriller about fractured egos and unwieldy power dynamics. The feature debut from writer-director Chloe Domont occasionally buckles under its own immense weight and dramatic density, but it’s ugly and gripping in all the best ways, maintaining a sense of free fall while placing its fearless lead performances front and center.
Domont introduces us to Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) during a family wedding, via a comedy of errors involving oral sex, period blood, and a proposal gone both completely right and wrong. It’s surprisingly sweet and intimate, despite its public restroom setting. While the film never quite establishes their sexual dynamic with anything resembling voracious passion, they’re giggly and giddy enough about their engagement to be charming, the way a virginal teenage couple might be on their first night together. Regardless of intent, it’s an amusing enough baseline that the contrast of their professional routine the next morning lands like a brick. They leave their cramped New York apartment separately at the crack of dawn, only to arrive at the office of the same ruthless hedge fund, where they both work as analysts trading and shorting various stocks, maintaining a professional demeanor towards each other all the while.
When a highly coveted position becomes vacant (along with a fancy corner office), Luke is rumored to be next in line. However, after Emily is called away to a late-night meeting with their stone-faced boss, Campbell (played by a terrifying Eddie Marsan), she ends up being offered the position instead. Luke is, of course, taken aback – they both are – though he tries to be supportive despite his obvious disappointment. However, the cracks in their relationship soon begin to show, exacerbated by an inability to properly express their concerns, and by a wounded ego Luke fails to keep in check now that he works directly under Emily.
There are lengthy stretches during the first half of the film’s 115 minutes, when it feels like Domont and cinematographer Menno Mans don’t quite know where to focus their camera in silent moments. The frame moves as if with purpose, only to reveal nothing in particular in the characters’ peripheries. It’s oddly distracting, bordering on amateur – that is, until things are suddenly kicked up a notch, leaving little breathing room and time to meander. As the couple’s personal and professional lives collide, a mutual resentment builds and ends up taking surprising form: As much as Fair Play is a domestic drama, it’s a workplace thriller too, with millions of dollars often hanging in the balance. The movie is never quite detailed about its financial nuts and bolts, but it frames each decision in the dramatic context of the inevitable clash between the couple’s public and private lives, the secrecy of which constantly threatens their careers.
Dynevor is a more than capable actress, and she navigates the testosterone-fueled Wall Street ladder with the requisite temptation and trepidation (the film is, for the most part, self-aware about the toxicity of its “girl boss” musings in such a rancid financial context). However, what occasionally slows the film’s progression is its relatively straightforward conception of Emily, whose existence is defined largely by external parameters: her relationship, her job, her bosses, and so forth. On one hand, this plays like sly commentary about the boxes women are forced to navigate in a male-dominated corporate sphere, but the character’s dramatic framing often feels incomplete. While her interiority is defined in distinctly cinematic terms – the meaning of her gaze is created by cuts to who and what she looks at – close-ups of Emily herself rarely reveal anything about who she is beneath the surface.
Neither Luke nor Emily seem to have opinions, interests, or perspectives outside their jobs and each other, though this too can be read as self-reflexive commentary on the corporate rat race. The major difference is the way Domont films and directs Ehrenreich’s performance. The way he simmers and stews in silence is remarkable, creating a palpable tension that obscures Luke and Emily’s relationship in a fog that’s difficult for either of them to put into words. He’s a ticking dramatic time bomb, building to the point of explosion, and watching Ehrenreich slowly but surely reach that stage is exciting and maddening all on its own. This sensation is also enhanced by the film’s masterful sound design, which makes each mundane environment feel jagged, whether it’s workplace chatter or one’s romantic partner simply moving about the house.
What is perhaps most thrilling about Fair Play is the way it turns words into weapons, affording both its lead actors the opportunity to consider each exchange and react to them in all the wrong ways. It’s shockingly disarming in its vivid depiction of a relationship on the verge of crumbling, including the ways in which bedroom power dynamics become blurred by a lack of communication. While it ends up in a place that’s perhaps too morally didactic for a film so otherwise untidy and complex, Fair Play stands out as one of the rare modern Hollywood thrillers where the stakes boil down entirely to personal terms, thanks to a masterful sense of escalation from a first-time filmmaker whose work is very likely going to be worth keeping an eye on.
