The twin dangers of dating your co-workers and a fragile male ego collide in Chloe Domont’s sharp, spiky, and often thrilling debut Fair Play. Set at a cutthroat investment capital firm, it follows a passionate secret romance between two young high-flyers at the firm, Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), that is derailed when Emily gets a prestigious promotion that Luke had assumed was earmarked for him. Pretending to be happy for his partner, Luke is driven mad by jealousy and wounded pride, leaving Emily in the impossible position of having to manage him and his resentment, both as a partner and, suddenly, a professional subordinate.
Domont wastes very little time in introducing us to our lead couple and their white-hot connection – within the first couple of minutes we’re seeing them giggling their way through some vigorous but fumbled sex that ends with a marriage proposal in a toilet at Luke’s brother’s wedding – quickly building a dynamic that will soon alter and crumble. Almost as soon as Emily gets the promotion, though, the passion dries up, the emasculation felt by Luke almost literal, while Domont starts planting red flags for where Luke’s desperation will eventually drive him.
Seen through Emily’s eyes, he’s a very effective villain, sometimes frightening, sometimes just sad, but always pathetic in his boys’ club sense of entitlement – a scene in which he literally begs the pair’s venomous boss Campbell (Eddie Marsan) for a promotion hits near-nuclear levels of embarrassment. You know it’s all heading for disaster, and though the eventual climax does fizzle out a bit, the needling sense of discomfort that Domont creates along the way there is fantastic. She creates the sort of flashy-yet-grim world of high-level finance that will be instantly familiar to fans of HBO’s Industry or Succession, but makes it her own through a careful and darkly funny look at how Emily navigates the gendered dynamics of a such a testosterone-fuelled milieu.
We watch as she tries out a few personae, from politely laughing at Campbell’s jokes to being ‘one of the boys’ during a night out at a strip club with her otherwise all-male peers, and none of them are quite comfortable – Domont makes it clear that Emily is going to have to kill a part of herself to become the ruthless corporate shark she needs to be. She also consistently finds time to dig down into Emily and Luke’s relationship, even as it barrels towards its calamitous end (a tiny moment in which Luke confidently orders Emily a more ‘girly’ drink than she would naturally buy for herself is a perfect little summation of their whole dynamic).
Fair Play has been described as an ‘erotic thriller’, and while I’m not sure that it’s twisty or, really, consistently sexy enough to earn that title, even its non-committal toe dips into the genre are compelling, aided by infectiously high-strung and stressed-out performances from Dynevor and Ehrenreich. Domont walks the line between prestige drama and something more schlocky mostly successfully and, though a few more diversions into the more heightened tone its genre might suggest would have been welcome, shows herself as a fearsome and fearless new talent to watch.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 