I'll be honest: I don't really get Taylor Swift. I mean, her songs are fine, but I don't get her. So, rather than my irrelevant thoughts on her concert film and how it tore up the box office last weekend, I bring you a review of a streaming movie that everyone is describing as an "erotic thriller," even though it's more of an incredibly tense dissection of gender politics in romance and the workplace. Chloe Domont's debut feature Fair Play is streaming on Netflix.
Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) are madly in love. But they're both analysts at One Crest Capital, a New York hedge fund with strict rules against workplace romance, so they keep their passionate trysts and shared apartment a secret.
The day after the pair become engaged, one of the firm's portfolio managers cracks under the ruthless pressure of competition (a regular occurrence), and Emily hears office gossip that Luke will be tapped for the job. She and Luke are already celebrating when they discover that ice-cold CEO Campbell (Eddie Marsan) has chosen to promote Emily instead.
Luke says he's happy. After all, what's good for one of them is good for both of them. But now Emily is his boss, and with the stress of making multimillion-dollar gambles bearing down on her, she's caught between supporting her fiancé and supporting the firm. The choices she makes — and Luke's reactions to them — put them on a path away from happily ever after.
Periodically, I see social media debates about whether movie sex scenes are "necessary." Some people — especially members of Gen Z — opine that such acts should be relegated to porn sites and only tastefully implied in mainstream cinema. But there are decidedly non-pornographic films that wouldn't make sense without their sex scenes, because there's nothing generic about sex. It's as varied as the people doing it, their moods that day, the state of their relationship and its sociocultural context.
For proof, look at the early scenes of Fair Play, in which writer-director Domont does a masterful job of creating expectations that she will demolish over the course of the film. We meet Luke and Emily at Luke's brother's wedding, where everyone congratulates him on his desirable "catch." Tipsy and happy, the pair get busy in the restroom.
It's the kind of cheesy scene you might see on a prime-time soap, until a mishap involving menstrual blood derails the proceedings. Luke's reaction reveals that he's a cool guy — or wants to be seen as one, anyway. Meanwhile, the audience may recognize the blood as foreshadowing of some very different scenes in this vein to come.
Fair Play is about the stress that patriarchal norms can put on romance, even when both lovers think of themselves as liberated and self-defining. It feels true to life that these young characters never openly discuss sexism. The closest we get is when Emily, realizing that her success has doomed her relationship, finally cries out, "Why does everything have to depend on whether you make it to No. 1?"
There is no answer; the world depicted here speaks for itself. Gendered expectations permeate the couple's workplace, where the other analysts assume that Emily must have snagged her promotion by sleeping with the boss (a wonderfully slimy, nuanced performance by Marsan). Those expectations infect Emily's behavior, as she buys expensive rounds and tosses money at strippers to prove she's one of the boys. They also torment Luke, who feels emasculated when he's excluded from these after-work rituals.
Neither lover is blameless in the ugly events that unfold. But Domont shows us that the real problem is Luke and Emily's inability to see beyond the winner-take-all values of their profession, which make few allowances for human decency, let alone love.
Fair Play isn't escapist in the way that many actual erotic thrillers are. Domont uses handheld camerawork, quick cuts and the urban setting — shrilling subway brakes, for instance — to keep us breathlessly on edge. Neither Luke nor Emily is especially likable. With distaste mixed with recognition, we observe how he resents her ability to transform herself from a sexy "cupcake" (his term) to a workplace drone and back. Meanwhile, she resents that he doesn't need to transform himself at all.
The movie serves as a graphic (in every sense) reminder that sex scenes can titillate audiences and make them cringe in horror within the span of the same film. Context matters. Watching Fair Play sometimes feels like observing a slow-motion traffic accident, but it gets at enduring conflicts between men and women in ways that few movies have.
In the Company of Men (1997; fuboTV, rentable): Neil LaBute's workplace drama about two executives who use an unwitting woman as a pawn in their dominance game would make a fascinating companion watch with Fair Play, which shows how far women have come (or not) since then.
The Assistant (2020; Max, rentable): Released just before the pandemic, Kitty Green's slice-of-life drama about workplace misconduct resembles Fair Play in portraying a female lead who is far from an innocent victim of those dynamics.
The Last Seduction (1994; Freevee, Peacock, PLEX, Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Sling TV, Tubi, Vudu, YouTube, rentable): When it was released, this thriller provoked earnest discussions about whether feminism had gone "too far" — not because the lead was a scheming con artist but because she dared to demand sex from men, much like Emily.