‘Fair Play’ Is a Nasty, Invigorating Entry in the Gender War Canon - Vanity Fair

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Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor are electric in a rattling Sundance thriller.

January 21, 2023

‘Fair Play Is a Nasty Invigorating Entry in the Gender War Canon

As we journey through the era of the so-called #MeToo movie, it’s fascinating to see what new shapes and subtleties those films take on. The reckonings and recriminations have become no less bold in the last five years, but the messages being imparted have maybe been complicated and honed by the passage of time. Look, as an example, to the new film Fair Play, the auspicious debut feature of TV writer-director Chloe Domont which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

The film is about a hot young couple, Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), whose romance is a secret at the high-powered hedge fund where they both work. At the start of the film, they’re meager analysts, angling for higher status in a cruel and merciless ecosystem. Though they are toiling at the howling-hot center of capitalist evil, we strangely root for these attractive go-getters. Their clandestine affair—well, it’s more than that; they’ve just gotten engaged, in sweetly messy fashion—gives them a sexy, conspiratorial glow that we are helplessly drawn toward. Ominous music (by Brian McOmber) and shadowy cinematography (by Menno Mans) tell us we are probably wrong to pine after them.

When a superior is let go (he destroys his office with a golf club in response), a coveted position opens up. Emily overhears that Luke is going to get the promotion, a rumor these two intensely (sociopathically?) ambitious people celebrate as fact with a heady round of booze and sex. But a meeting with the boss swiftly upends their happy, supportive dynamic: it’s Emily who’s being promoted instead.

Thus Domont begins traversing a variety of fronts in the gender wars. At first, we guiltily feel a nervous tingle of social order disrupted—we know we shouldn’t cringe with worry over a woman getting promoted over a man, even when (or maybe especially when) he is her intended, and yet we do. How will Luke react to this potential slight to his manhood, and what, if anything, can or should Emily do to mitigate that? Domont keeps plucking the strings of those questions as the couple’s tensions and frustrations mount. Luke’s encouraging, proud-of-you-babe demeanor falters; a bad trade is made and Emily finds herself in the hot seat; Emily’s new extracurricular job requirements have her drifting deeper into the snake pit of finance-bro depravity.

As Emily and Luke struggle to accept and adjust to these new realities, Domont doesn’t lets us settle into an expected narrative. To Fair Play’s great credit, it’s never clear where exactly the film is going: whether Luke will redeem himself or sink further into envious rage; if Emily will maintain her already tenuous footing or will give in to any, or all, of the fealty-demanding men around her. Things do eventually shift into melodrama, but even then Domont has a firm command of her yawing ship. Despite all the histrionics swallowing up the film, a great deal of restraint remains. Domont eschews obvious developments and applies careful details that keep Fair Play sinewy and intriguing.

She has brilliant help in that regard from Dynevor and Ehrenreich. Their performances are electrifying, in moments of fraught quiet and in their characters’ hyper-volume, venomous arguments. I was previously unfamiliar with Dynevor, who is best known for the Netflix series Bridgerton, and so she arrived in the film, for me anyway, as a wonderful discovery. She shrewdly manages Emily’s different strains of mettle, her workplace acumen and her acute sense of balance at home. She and Domont also wisely let Emily transgress, to be at fault, to be perhaps a bit insensitive to Luke’s more reasonable gripes. (Of which there aren’t many.)

Ehrenreich, meanwhile, doesn’t make Luke an obvious monster, nor a good guy falling helplessly prey to deeply ingrained male entitlement. He’s somewhere in an ugly, credible middle, doing selfish things but usually resetting to decency—or, at least, a performance of it. It’s a terrific turn from an actor whose promising career was seemingly blown off course by Solo (a perfectly entertaining Star Wars movie) and may only now be recovering. Or, at least, it should be so once more people see Fair Play, such a forceful reminder of his talent.

Fair Play is designed to court controversy, to be a lightning rod for intense debate, online and off. The film will certainly get what it’s asking for in that regard. But I also hope that future viewers—be they watching on streaming, or in theaters, or wherever—will also appreciate the choices the movie could make but doesn’t. There’s little didacticism here. Only a handful of strained moments too-aggressively point themselves at crowd-pleasing vengeance. Fair Play is a film responsive to internet discourse but not acting in service of it. It’s a grim, dynamic thriller, one that sets workplace and home crashing into one another in a small symphony of beautiful disharmony.