In the beginning, Emily and Luke are golden. They’re ambitious and imminently wealthy young professionals, dressed in the sleek monochromes of quiet luxury. They’re so in love that they can’t even make it through a wedding without pawing at each other. When a bathroom tryst gets derailed by her period blood, it’s a silly prelude to their rushed engagement, a mess of passion and, in the new Netflix thriller Fair Play, an omen of pain ahead.
The caustic debut film by the writer/director Chloe Domont sets up a model relationship in a rarefied and ruthless space. Emily (Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke’s (Alden Ehrenreich) love has all the hallmarks of something incipient and promising – they share an apartment, a bed, a lifestyle. But by dating each other, they are breaking company policy at the cutthroat Manhattan hedge fund where they both work. Their attraction thrives on secrecy – they barely acknowledge each other at the office, then have sex on the floor at home – as much as the other’s perceived shrewdness at navigating the type of workplace where boilerplate HR trainings occur in view of an employee beating a monitor with a golf club.
Such navigation requires different sacrifices and strategies from the couple, and therein lies the problem: Emily works harder to fit in the boys’ club, and is better at it. Luke expects a promotion and a hefty pay raise, but she lands it instead. One of the buzziest titles out of this year’s Sundance, Fair Play has caused a stir for its teeth-gnashingly tense portrayal of gendered power dynamics – the kind that keep women out of the upper echelons of corporate power, the kind that lead to expectations of parity at work and inequitable labor at home. It’s a deft portrait of a relationship rotting from within. Luke initially says the right things to Emily – that he’s happy for her, that she deserves it – but her elevation of status knocks some heretofore hidden resentment loose, a wounded entitlement whose destruction the film traces in a tight, brutal spiral.
Fair Play succeeds in combining a sleek prestige style – the erotic thriller, the office drama with Industry-esque financial volleying and Succession-style morals – with a familiar fear within heterosexual relationships: that if you just push hard enough, the mask of the good guy will fall; that expectations of male superiority of material power, of being the breadwinner, are so baked into our culture that all the right words can hide an intrinsic discomfort with being second. The film was inspired by dating men who “on the one hand, supported me and were attracted to me because I was ambitious and intelligent and they wanted me to succeed”, Domont told the Guardian. “But on the other hand, there was this feeling that they needed to get there first, and for whatever reason my accomplishments became a poor reflection of their self-worth.”
Fair Play is an outsized imagination of that zero-sum, often intangible game, a parable about the rickety foundation of a cishet relationship in which neither are a particularly moral player (Emily and Luke deal in cold, hard millions and aspire to accrue the wealth that blinks away more; “I never went into this to be a hero, and neither did you,” Emily lobs at Luke in a hellish late-stage confrontation). And it’s arguably the most cutting of several films eviscerating the angry entitlement of certain self-fashioned “good guys”.
Such an illusion – that a potential love interest may be, when denied some expectation, anywhere from icky to dangerous – underscores Cat Person, another buzzy Sundance title that unfortunately veers the viral 2017 New Yorker short story from the terrain of ambivalent, fraught sexual encounter to straight-up thriller. The shedding of the mask – charming good guy revealed to be a predator – was the consistent trap and punchline used to diminishing effect in Emerald Fennell’s 2021 film Promising Young Woman, which reshaped the classic rape revenge fantasy into a deadeningly black #MeToo avenger comedy. Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson connects Fair Play to the yet-to-be-released Sundance documentary Justice, about the brain-searing confirmation hearings of the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, a real-life version of the blubbering “good guy” incandescent with petulant rage.
All three features touch on something recognizable and simmering in the post-#MeToo world, and all struggle with how villainous to make their men. Fair Play is the best of them, propulsive and well-acted and bitingly cringe, as Luke crumbles and Emily flails to help him. (More than once, I shouted “girl, NO” at my screen.) It is an excellent debut and an imperfect film, undercutting its own tension by stacking the deck too far in Emily’s favor. Luke is revealed to be not only jealous and threatened – juicy material rich for dissection, and also not unusual – but also near incompetent at his job and vaguely men’s rights-y (a side plot involving Luke’s buy-in to a motivational speaker clearly modeled on Jordan Peterson is overkill).
The blankness of the their out-of-work lives can be both suggestive – a canvas for personal experience with gendered power dynamics – and deflating, rendered in stark black and white and increasingly cartoonish behavior. A final sexual encounter between them that I will not spoil is much thornier and ickier than the preceding descent, which is mostly biting one’s nails and hoping Emily doesn’t throw her career away for a dunce.
Such is Fair Play’s at times highly watchable insight and its limitation: underneath all the shiny talk of empowerment, we’re all just complicated people – sometimes petty, shaped by ideas we don’t necessarily understand, potentially horrible but not usually villainous. In Ehrenreich’s convincing performance, Luke never seems to grasp how deluded his sense of righteousness is, how unwarranted his aggrievement. The end result to such a rollercoaster is not power but pity.
Fair Play is out now on Netflix
