Fair Play was THE film at Sundance this year that got all the buzz with its reported 20-million-dollar Netflix acquisition. The debut feature from writer/director Chloe Domont, who cut her teeth in television, is a scintillating thriller that pretty much opens with some very messy period sex (that people behind me in the theatre misinterpreted as a miscarriage) and also ends with blood, but in a very different way that feels earned.
The drama and the tension in the film don’t come from shocking twists as the dynamics at play are pretty explicit and clear from the beginning, both in the relationship between Emily (played by Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (played by Alden Ehrenreich) and those at work and how they intermingle in the fact that Emily and Luke are in a secret relationship because they are co-workers, one that becomes more complicated when one of them gets promoted into a directly supervisory role over the other. The film invites you to be in the know, to see the red flags. It wants you to be the analyst on the stock of their relationship and anticipate the crash.
If you are familiar with Bridgerton, then you’ll probably recognize Phoebe Dynevor who for most of the movie plays pretty much the only on-screen female character. She is wonderful and acts the heck of the part of a character who is trying her best to juggle her relationship and job but she assisted in this task with wardrobe, makeup, and Menno Mans’ cinematography under Chloe Domont’s direction that serves to create tension. I’m thinking particularly of a shot after Luke “negs” her and she abandons her earlier fashion and the framing makes her hair look particularly tight and her face gaunt, almost like a different person.
Alden Ehrenreich, who I most recently saw in Cocaine Bear (a total romp if you are looking for something fun), plays male fragility well, shifting between cunning manipulator, pouter, and paranoid sometimes within the span of a few lines.
A LITTLE SPOILERLY AHEAD
I rather enjoy films that use bookending effectively, because it both calls back but also twists the original scenes, you have to view them as a façade, because by the end you know this is the nature of things. And Fair Play does it very well with two party scenes and what takes place in the bathroom. There was an audible gasp that went out during both bathroom scenes, for very different reasons.
At first, I thought the film was going to end right after the second party scene since the film began with a party and they already bookended that. While the film still would have worked had it ended there, I’m glad that was not the decision Chloe Domont made because the film was richer for the inclusion of the scenes that followed. I’d overlooked/justified one aspect of the first bathroom scene that wasn’t replicated in the second bathroom scene back but Miss Domont had just withheld it until a later scene where she could capitalize on it for more impact by contextualizing it differently.
Fair Play is currently having a limited theatrical run before it arrives on Netflix on October 6th.
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