Fair Play — Chloe Domont

The most buzzed-about title at this past January’s Sundance (accompanied by an astonishing $20 million acquisition from Netflix), Chloe Domont’s Fair Play has been heralded as the triumphant return of the “erotic thriller,” and, to borrow a sentiment from Nelson Muntz, there are at least two things wrong with that description. A slick-looking yet lifeless corporate drama set amidst the high-stakes world of hedge funds, the film boasts what is admittedly a tantalizing premise: two financial analysts, one male and one female, surreptitiously date one another only to find their relationship begins to sour once she’s promoted ahead of him. As she ascends to the upper ranks of the boy’s club, she begins to take on some of the less charming (and overwhelmingly male-coded) traits of her C-level colleagues while his wounded masculinity leads to him retreat further into his work, unable to share in the excitement of her success. It’s fertile ground to explore the ever-shifting dynamics in the battle of the sexes, yet Domont confuses thematic incoherence for nuance, pulling her punches for much of the film only to wildly overcompensate in the home stretch. It all feels like a handful of David Mamet scripts reduced down in a pot with much of the misanthropy and all the tartly memorable dialogue skimmed off the top.

We’re introduced to the newly engaged Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) drunkenly pawing at one another at his brother’s wedding. Young, ambitious, and attractive — the characters are even sanguine about getting menstrual blood all over their best clothing, implying a commendable level of sex-positivity in the film’s early scenes that’s subsequently abandoned — the couple spends their private hours adorably playing house out of a spacious Manhattan apartment only to feign indifference for one another at work, even staggering their arrival at the office lest they draw unwanted attention. Luke is rumored to be in line for the office’s recently vacated portfolio manager role, but when the firm’s domineering, thuggish president Campbell (ubiquitous character actor Eddie Marsan, trading his British accent for a Noo Yawk one) reaches past him and selects Emily to be PM, it changes the tenor of the celebration. Luke smiles through his disappointment while Emily’s first instinct is to apologize, assuring her fiancé that this will be good for both of them as she’s now ideally situated to champion him. But it becomes apparent that Luke has no future at the firm — Campbell admits in private that he only hired Luke as a favor; he intends to neg him until he’s spared the trouble of firing him when he finally quits. Worried about further bruising his fragile psyche, Emily refuses to tell him, instead trying to sell the perks of the job — hefty commission checks, tables at exclusive restaurants — as a win for both of them. But with Luke increasingly caught up in his own head — tanking his sex drive just as the newly emboldened and frequently sloshed Emily sees a spike in her own libido — and desperate to prove his worth, it becomes clear that no amount of tap dancing or ego-massaging will save this relationship and that something’s got to give.      

It’s to Domont’s credit that the film avoids easy villainization for as long as it does. Ehrenreich channels Luke’s frustration into relentless self-improvement — getting up early to work out, grinding away at the office well into the evening, taking self-help courses — with the character’s “hostility” initially limited to being a wet blanket or being too preoccupied with getting his own career on track to bother with sabotaging Emily. In fact, at first it’s Emily, shown repeatedly crawling home drunk in the middle of the night and expecting sex on demand, who could credibly be accused of changing for the worse; she even employs the language of quid pro quo, albeit in a more forgivable context, that she’ll help Luke’s career if he goes down on her. Eventually, though, perhaps recognizing that the film is merely going in circles — or, more cynically, that there isn’t quite the same appetite for a film that argues career advancement nurtures toxic traits in women as much as it does men — a switch flips in Luke. Based on office chatter and his wandering imagination, Luke becomes consumed with the idea that Emily only received the promotion because she slept her way to the top. Suddenly, the sweet, scrunch-faced guy smiling through the pain is calling Emily a “hooker,” disappearing for days on end, and is showing up to the office going through the exaggerated motions of behaving like a drunken wretch. It’s all setting the stage for an act of transgression that’s clearly been conceived as the film’s line-blurring raison d’être, or would be if the moment wasn’t also so nakedly calculated and contrived.