Fair Play: a sizzling, sex-swapped Fatal Attraction

At its Sundance premiere earlier this year, Fair Play was feted as a rare new entry in the erotic thriller canon. But one of the most interesting things about TV director Chloe Domont’s sizzling, grabby debut feature is all the sex its central couple don’t have.

Meet Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich): two young high-fliers in the cut-throat world of New York finance. When we first encounter them canoodling in the bathroom at a friend’s wedding, their romance couldn’t seem steamier.

But then something shifts, and passion turns to icy resentment. For the increasingly frantic and paranoid Luke, impotence takes hold; meanwhile, Emily starts to regard her lover with a grim mix of fear and contempt. For the above reasons and more, any further intimacy between them is off the table. And what prompts this disastrous change? Simple: she gets a better job.

The two work at a hedge fund presided over by Campbell  – a whispery, glinting-eyed sadist, rivetingly played by Eddie Marsan, who casts his staff in his own sociopathic image. Lip service is paid to modern HR mores – his foot soldiers are brought to the board room to watch a video about respectful workplace conduct – although the volume isn’t quite high enough to drown out the executive in the glass office next door, furiously pounding his PC to atoms with a golf club.

Luke has styled himself after his toxic boss, but when a senior analyst role becomes available, it’s Emily who gets it – and the sting of emasculation inflames his life, then hers. Imagine a gender-flipped version of Fatal Attraction in which thwarted male entitlement, rather than female obsessiveness, is what drops the poor bunny in the stock pot.

First-time writer-director Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf. In a wince-inducing early ‘red flag’ moment, she has Emily apologise to Luke for being promoted: on some level, she’s already aware just how wounding her good news will prove.

As their relationship worsens, the drama grows silly and severe by turns – though for the most part, neither mode impedes the other, thanks to finely calibrated performances from both leads. Ehrenreich ranges across preening passive-aggression, out-and-out menace and abject pitifulness – a scene in which he puts on a show of office fealty to Campbell becomes almost unwatchably humiliating.

And Dynevor neatly captures all of the fronts a young woman in this line of work has to cycle through in order to survive: the chic but bulletproof boardroom exterior; the caring confidant act required to manage her unstable lover; and later, the cornered cat with hackles up and claws bared. The film pointedly begins with blood being accidentally shed during an act of passion: rest assured there’s more on the way.

On Netflix now