The Thrilling Fatalism of 'Fair Play'

Over the years, I’ve tried to take certain words out of my film criticism vocabulary. They’re words that aren’t particularly useful, or they’ve become so overused as to be rendered meaningless. “Boring” is a too broad, bland, and ironically, “boring” of an adjective. “Pretentious” rarely specifies what the film is “pretending” to be beyond “artsy,” and too often the critique simply means that the director decided against using conventional storytelling, which isn’t inherently pretentious. I’ve also grown tired of using the critique of “predictable,” which only serves to signal that the critic has seen a bunch of movies and thus knows plot beats.

But a good film isn’t necessarily predicated on surprising the audience. In an age of spoiler warnings, it may seem like plot twists are so valuable that we dare not speak them lest we give away a turn and ruin the entire narrative. But Chloe Domont’s debut feature Fair Play is a potent reminder that stories don’t need to twist themselves into convoluted loops to hold our interest. They don’t need to swerve every ten minutes to keep the audience’s attention if the director has the confidence of their vision. Fair Play ends at exactly the place you think it’s going to, and that fatalism is where the film derives its potency.

The story follows Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), a newly engaged couple who have to keep their relationship a secret because they work together at a prestigious financial firm where romantic entanglements are against company policy. When one of their colleagues gets sacked, they think that Luke will get the promotion, but the promotion goes to Emily instead. For Emily, who was happy for Luke when she thought he was getting promoted, she now has an extra job: managing her fiancé’s insecurities and fragile masculinity.

If you look at stories as devices designed only to surprise you, then you may be left unimpressed with Fair Play. But to see a film as only a jack-in-the-box ignores the strength of Domont’s direction and storytelling as well as the commitment of her two lead actors. What makes Fair Play a gripping tale isn’t that Emily and Luke had a love story for the ages or that there will be some twist where they realize the financial firm is actually a reality TV show. Fair Play works because Domont tells a story we already know exceedingly well: a mediocre white man can’t abide a system where he may have less power than the woman in his life.

What’s particularly clever is showing how Luke is, at every turn, the more emotional party, not just in his relationship with Emily, but how he views his position at the firm. Luke thinks everything is personal as opposed to Emily, who had to work her way up to where she is. Emily, by the nature of being a woman in this male-dominated workplace, has no choice but to be a cold pragmatist devoted to making as much money as humanly possibly for the firm whereas Luke thinks it’s about words, not deeds. Luke, despite his increasingly unhinged behavior towards Emily, never grasps that emotions have nothing to do with his job performance at the money factory.

Domont succeeds showing her characters in this light because she and her actors carve out Luke and Emily so clearly. We may not know every contour of their relationship, but we understand the broader contexts of men and women in the workplace, and how weak men like Luke frequently resent any woman who is more successful. Everything we see of Luke before Emily gets her promotion shows how care-free he is because he thought his life was going to unfold one way. Emily mistakes his benevolence towards her as love, and after she’s promoted she comes to realize who Luke really is: a boy who didn’t get what he wanted.

It’s to Domont’s credit that she makes the inevitable feel like a pressure cooker. I wouldn’t say I was ever “rooting” for Luke and Emily (you won’t typically find me rooting for people who work on Wall Street), it’s fascinating to see how the relationship falls apart because Emily’s greatest flaw is in trying to save it. Whether it’s because she’s too young or too much of a romantic or is simply a woman in a patriarchal society that says a man’s feelings always come first, she doesn’t tell Luke, “I got promoted ahead of you. If you don’t like it, I really don’t give a shit. If you love me, this won’t matter to you. If it does, then we shouldn’t be together, and there’s the door.” Instead, she’s in quicksand, trying to manage this loser’s feelings while also trying to have a successful career.

Dynevor and Ehrenreich play out this dynamic brilliantly. Emily’s arc is a woman who thought she had a partner and instead learns she had a gigantic man-baby who is now dragging her down due to his insecurities. She’s a woman who learns that she’s going to have to shed some of her humanity because every empathetic act will be used against her by a man who no longer sees her as a partner but a rival. For Ehrenreich, he has to find the humanity in a repulsive guy and make us interested in Luke even if we know he’s the worst. He does this by essentially playing Luke as a tragic figure in the center of the universe; a man that no one, not even the woman he “loves,” can truly appreciate it. Society promised him greatness, and now he has a front-row seat at seeing that greatness denied to him (but without the benefit of any introspection that would say, “Hey, maybe I’m the problem here.”)

Fair Play is a thriller, but one that scars instead of surprises. The terminus of the story is perfectly clear. The way these characters are drawn and the world they inhabit can only have one outcome. That’s not a shortcoming. That’s a success.

Fair Play opens in select theaters on September 29th. It releases globally on Netflix on October 6th.