'Fair Play' effectively chips away
Netflix
Laugh if you must, but if Netflix suggests “Fair Play” after you finish the new season of “Love is Blind,” there’s a reason: On the reality show, a hyper-compressed relationship timeline leaves little opportunity to examine problem-solving as a partnership. There’s emotional connection, there’s chemistry, and also the possibility that conflict will turn into chaos.
Likewise, in the new corporate-relationship-thriller (totally a real genre), co-workers Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich of “Solo” and “Hail, Caesar”) have heat to spare and enough trust and understanding to sometimes navigate the unexpected (the opening sequence concocts a unique “What would you do in this situation?” prompt out of a wedding disaster). But when the secretly dating, even more secretly engaged couple expects Luke to be promoted and then the job goes to Emily, what should be the start of something good quickly becomes poison in the air. It’s a canny approach by writer and first-time feature director Chloe Domont (“Ballers”) anchoring the deterioration of a relationship and the escalation of a workplace pressure cooker on something as simple and theoretically beneficial as a new office and a raise.
To quote Ehrenreich’s character from “Hail, Caesar”: Would that it were so simple.
Domont isn’t going to blow anyone’s minds with insights about sexism in the workplace or even gender roles and toxic masculinity. (Post-promotion, Luke reports to Emily, BTW.) But this well-acted drama — which is arguably both a slow burn and a fast-moving vice squeeze — excels at tugging one strand of a rug and yanking the entire thing out from under two people who thought they could handle anything. Connection withers in the form of body language, and in a change in confidence that’s as undiscussed as it is unmissable. Meanwhile, Luke’s desperation to prove himself only adds to the movie’s awareness of mistakes as a side effect of skipped steps; fail to consider the angles, “Fair Play” seems to say, and prepare to be impaled on them.
Well, maybe not something so painful. And maybe so. Even if Domont struggles to free some characters from a singular mindset or some conceptions that feels a little too familiar, the movie breaks the skin in a disturbing vision of what they say about the higher the climb, the farther the fall. (Pretty sure that’s only partially a Miley Cyrus lyric, moving on.) It’s a little like if “Disclosure” wasn’t salacious nonsense, or if the problem with “The Firm” wasn’t the firm. In other words, points to “Fair Play” for feeling like a modern adaptation of a book from the ‘90s.
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