Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fair Play’ on Netflix, a Scorching Erotic Thriller Marking Phoebe Dynevor’s Emergence

Sex and money and power – all the stuff of Fair Play (now streaming on Netflix), a scintillating erotic thriller set in the world of high-pressure hedge funds. It’s the feature-length directorial debut from Chloe Domont, who graduates from TV like Suits, Ballers and Billions to this steamy, high-wire drama starring Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton) as Wall Street traders or analysts (or whatever) who share a bed and share office space, but when there’s only one open slot for a promotion… uh oh. Just HOW uh oh does it get? Pretty damn uh oh, as it turns out.

FAIR PLAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Forgive me for being vague, but it needs to be said that Fair Play starts with menstrual blood and ends with regular blood-type blood. It’s emblematic of the white-hot, high-pressure love story of Emily (Dynevor) and Luke (Ehernreich, who’s now played a Luke and a Han), who can’t keep their hands off each other. And it’s not just lust – in the opening sequence, Luke proposes and she accepts, because they’re very much in love love love. But it needs to stay a secret – they work together, and fraternizing with other employees is against company policy. They leave for work and take different routes and show up at the office and pretend to be merely cordial. If that seems a bit regressive, well, it seems less so as the context is more fully established and this plot unravels. And boy, does it unravel.

See, Luke and Emily work for a finance company. A hedge fund, I think – for us plebes, it all sounds like jibberjabber from Uranus. At least on a base level, it’s one of those cutthroat competitive offices where you buy buy buy and sell sell sell and when project managers inevitably get axed, the wolves go for each other’s throats to see who can become the next sub-alpha to the big, rich boss. One guy gets the ax and as he screams obscenities and smashes up his office with a golf club, the lower-rung employees (analysts? Traders? Does any of this mean anything in a non-psychotic work environment?) shrug and turn up the volume on the sexual harassment video they’re being forced to watch. It’s the kind of job that makes scraping sewers look like a sweetheart gig.

Anyway. That office is open and Emily overhears chatter that Luke is gonna be the guy to fill it. Hooray? But then she gets a phone call that wakes her up and she’s summoned to a bar at 2am and the big, rich boss (Eddie Marsan) is sitting there. The promotion is hers. Hooray? But Emily’s the rare female in his office, so it’s a grotesque boys’ club, and rumors fly that she slept her way to the position, and on top of that, she feels pressure to be one of those boys, those gross, gross boys. Things are OK at home with Luke, though. For now. Sort of. Until he starts to wonder if she did do those unsavory things to get the gig. Nevermind that she’s really good at her job, and is willing to use her newfound power to help him get the next promotion. 

Either way, cracks in their relationship start to show. He resists her sexual advances. They work on a deal that costs the company millions and the big, rich boss calls her a “dumb f—ing bitch”; they work on a subsequent deal that earns the company many more millions than it lost, and the big, rich boss hands her a big, fat commission. Meanwhile, her pushy-pushy mother takes it upon herself to organize a fancy dinner party to celebrate Luke and Emily’s engagement just as stress levels start pegging over into the red. This movie – it’s been a rumbling volcano, and it’s about to erupt. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Fair Play is an inspired blend of the high-pressure/high-finance drama of The Big Short or Wall Street — or even the HBO series Industry — with the sexy-psycho stuff of thrillers like Unfaithful or Body Heat. 

Performance Worth Watching: Dynevor is revelatory here, meshing perfectly with a fine-tuned, well-considered screenplay that gives her a character with room for exploring gray areas. Emily’s far from perfect, but is nevertheless sympathetic, and fully realized thanks to Dynevor’s performance.

Memorable Dialogue: This one’s such a doozy, I need to wholly decontextualize it: “If I can’t make you cry, I’m gonna make you bleed.”

Sex and Skin: Yes. Lots of it. (Note, some of it is troublingly violent.)

Our Take: CAPITALISM! Ain’t it grand? Sexism, too – can’t forget the sexism. But Fair Play is a far cry from 9 to 5; it fearlessly updates the male-female workplace power dynamic to modern standards, which is to say, it paints a portrait of male toxicity that pushes past amorality to near-fatality. And it’s riveting.

Domont zooms in tight on her leads, letting Ehrenreich (in easily his best performance) and Dynevor root out the complexities of their characters within gruelingly intense scenarios. As it turns out, Luke can’t handle the blow to his ego, and Emily might not be able to handle her newfound power. He turns to books and videos by a self-help guy who gives us a slight whiff of Tom Cruise in Magnolia; she devotes herself to pleasing the big, rich boss and fitting in with the lads to the point where she agrees to celebrate a big win by not only joining them at the strip club, but impressing them by making it rain. 

Nobody with more than three functioning brain cells will be surprised to see Luke and Emily’s relationship erupt with fissures in the wake of such fundamental change. His character is either deeply altered – or truly revealed – as he comes to understand that he may simply not be good enough to acquire the job he’s worked toward his entire career, to meet the standards of, frankly, the horrible human beings that are his superiors. It’s compounded by the fact that the freshly empowered woman he fornicates with tries to be the aggressor in the bedroom, which just doesn’t seem to turn him on. Meanwhile, Emily seems to understand that this particular brand of professional power is inevitably fleeting, but pursues it anyway, perhaps because she’s come to realize that her fiance is, deep down, a tantrum-prone toddler who’s too flimsy to engage in self-reflection.

I think the core question of Fair Play is whether Emily and Luke are fundamentally flawed people, or if the world made them that way. Domont seems slightly noncommittal, which is a good thing – nobody’s perfect, and our tendency to want to side with Emily is challenged by her complexities. But Domont isn’t at all interested in presenting us with a movie about an unblemished princess who gets a stain on her dress. No, she wants to paint a portrait of individuals trapped in a world corrupted by men pursuing, yes, sex and money and power, all the “benefits” of amoral capitalism. The film doesn’t ask why, it just shows what it does to the human soul.

Our Call: STREAM IT. One more takeaway: You could make a lot of money in finance. Or you could be a perfectly happy teacher or postal clerk or sous chef, and thankful for it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.