Nothing is fair in love and war — in fact, it’s often cruel, sexy, and mean.
That’s the spirit of writer/director Chloe Domont’s feature directorial debut, “Fair Play,” a psychosexual corporate thriller with echoes of Adrian Lyne by way of HBO’s “Industry” that set the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on fire. So much so that Netflix ended up picking the film up for a cool $20 million in the biggest deal of the festival.
The film stars Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich as a newly engaged New York couple who can’t keep their hands off each other. They also work at the same investment firm, and none of their colleagues know they’re together. They’re also vying for the same promotion. None of this will end well, and that’s what you’ll get a taste of in the first trailer for “Fair Play,” available below.
The film will next hit the Toronto International Film Festival before opening in theaters from Netflix on September 29 and then streaming on the platform on October 13.
Domont previously directed episodes of “Billions,” “Suits,” and “Ballers,” and she deftly brings the patter of high-stakes financial gamesmanship to a talky screenplay that finds Emily (Dynevor) and Luke (Ehrenreich) whipsawing their way to their own professional and personal demise.
IndieWire has noted “Fair Play” as one of Netflix’s big Oscar contenders this year — it should make a splash on the streaming platform even despite the potentially muted fervor around the film press-wise due to the ongoing strikes.
As I wrote out of Sundance, “The filmmaking is slickly brutal to match Domont’s ever-shifting allegiances, with the austere outsides photographed by Menno Mans matching the cold insides of the people onscreen. Yet for all its moments set in corporate spaces and places devoid of all life, there’s hot blood running under ‘Fair Play,’ which has at least one more profoundly debasing sex scene to match the not-so-cold open. By the end of this steamy, razor-wired, barking-mad movie — you’ll understand that last bit once you see it — you realize that these two deserve each other, and we’re more than happy to merrily go to hell with them.”
Vanity Fair was first to premiere the trailer.
