Writer-director Chloe Domont’s searing and electric “Fair Play” is set in present day but in many ways feels like a throwback psychosexual thriller a la “9 ½ Weeks” and “Disclosure,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Unfaithful.” Nearly everyone in this film behaves as if we’re in a time and place at least a generation prior to the age of #MeToo, and that might stretch credulity — until you realize there probably are some workplaces in which far too many people still behave as if they didn’t get the memo.
This is a lurid, cynical, nasty, rough piece of work, and I mean that in the best possible way. With Alden Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story”) and Phoebe Dynevor (Daphne in “Bridgerton”) delivering arguably the most memorable work of their relatively young careers, writer-director Domont displaying a gift for brutal and at times almost campy dark dialogue and cinematographer Menno Mans providing the film noir visuals, “Fair Play” is a mesmerizing study of two people who have convinced themselves they’re madly in love when in fact they’re trapped in a quagmire of toxicity that could ruin both of them if someone doesn’t wake up and escape to the other side of the globe. It’s also sexy as hell and so bruising in a couple of instances that I was reminded of Neil LaBute’s pitch-black minor classic “In the Company of Men.”
