Fair Play review: In this riveting thriller, business and pleasure don't mix

A lot of films that attempt to assay the traditional power imbalance of male-female relationships either make the mistake of staking their fortune to a definitive worldview, or get so bogged down in gender studies didacticism that they fail to deliver actual entertainment. The wickedly engaging Fair Play, though, lives and breathes.

The feature debut of writer-director Chloe Domont, the film is a bad-romance thriller with an ample side serving of corporate backstabbing. It also serves as a fabulous showcase for stars Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich. What Fair Play gets most right, though, is its headlong dive into the messy complications and charged ambiguity of navigating romance in a fast-changing world. The result is an enjoyably caustic, character-driven drama that connects on multiple levels.

Set against the backdrop of a cutthroat Manhattan hedge fund management firm, Fair Play tells the story of a young, engaged couple whose secret relationship stands in violation of their company’s non-fraternization policy. Both eagerly seeking to climb the corporate ladder, Emily (Dynevor) and Luke (Ehrenreich) work as analysts for a boss, Campbell (Eddie Marsan), who wields his steely, calculated disregard like a shock baton.

When a coveted promotion, thought to go to Luke, instead goes to Emily, it sets in motion a series of events that turn up the temperature in what is already a high-pressure environment. While Luke initially maintains a façade of supportiveness, Emily’s elevation to the role of project manager summons forth petty jealousies and latent uncertainty. Against the backdrop of shifting power dynamics within their relationship, the couple must grapple with changes in what they are willing to bear for success.

By design, Fair Play provides dynamic, emotionally rich terrain for its two leads to traverse, and they do not disappoint. Dynevor (Bridgerton) is utterly superb, giving full dimension to an arc that sees her become the lead of her own story. Ehrenreich, meanwhile, locates a subtle speech pattern that, even when his answers aren’t specifically clipped and terse, still manages to communicate swirling undercurrents of resentment. This helps create a wonderful tension that opens up the material to further assessment and debate. Does Luke, in his bruised sullenness, genuinely love Emily (can he, even?), or is his entire attraction conditionally tied to a professionally packaged subservience?

Domont’s script, as she has noted in interviews, comes from a personal place, and this lived experience assists her in astutely capturing the myriad ways a person (often but not always a woman) can contort and diminish themselves in order to better psychologically accommodate a romantic partner who is threatened by their ambition and accomplishments.

But Fair Play is no polemic or stuffy academic treatise. Domont’s sketching of characters is deep and convincing. She also has a smart sense of where and how to add pin-prick details (like the circumstances that informed Luke’s hiring) to scenes in a way that makes them entertaining and helps contribute to an escalating tautness.

If there are shortcomings, they mostly arrive in the third act. While the wandering into the politics of sexual instigation and recrimination feels inevitable, the way Domont attaches some of these elements to a separate moral awakening rings improbable and somewhat awkward. Moreover, high-volume discord tends to stand in for more sharply articulated unraveling. Apart from a cringe-inducing scene of Luke’s professional self-debasement and a well-crafted, stakes-raising ending that generally rights the ship, the screenplay feels like it hits a wall, and has nothing for its characters left to verbalize except surface-level thoughts and profanity.

The counterpoint to this assessment, of course, is that rage-fueled yelling is precisely how many arguments unfold, and so maybe it’s perfectly reflective of a relationship hitting its expiration date. Still, given the profiles of these characters, a viewer is left wanting more than, for example, a blowout which ends with one of them screaming and theatrically swigging vodka.

On the technical side, Domont (who cut her teeth in episodic television including Ballers, Shooter and Billions) impressively oversees a well-conceived package whose cool assurance mirrors the confidence which blooms in Emily. Dutch cinematographer Menno Mans, trading in slow-moving shots, a smartly contrasted lighting scheme, and framing that favors character over setting, helps summon a slightly nervous vibe.

Together with Domont and production designer Steve Summersgill, Mans takes an element that could be limiting (the movie was shot in Serbia), and turns it into an odd strength. Instead of the city becoming an ancillary character, Fair Play assertively snuffs out any misbegotten notion or accidental chance of the movie becoming yet another “New York story.” And the effect is richer; Fair Play is a film that feels very modern but not quite anchored to any specific year, and very American but also a little anonymous and reflective of the broader world.

In the end, is Fair Play a vivisection of masculine insecurity and gaslighting? A razor-sharp snapshot of the interpersonal collateral damage wrought by the rapaciousness of capitalism? A toxic relationship study? A good old-fashioned psychological thriller? Yes, it’s all of those things.

In a landscape in which even most independent films play things too safe, Fair Play is the relatively rare movie with both a distinctive personality and an eagerness to dig around in the real-world sandbox and ask questions for which it knows there is no single, pat set of answers. It never stops making moves, in a way which makes even its missteps feel refreshing.

Fair Play opens in theaters September 29 and on Netflix October 13