Twisted corporate thriller that might just end workplace romances

Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in Fair Play, written and directed by Chloe Domont. (Screen grab from trailer/YouTube/Netflix)

“You think fear cultivates respect?” a drunk employee, asks his rude boss in a scene from Netflix’s supremely entertaining Fair Play. It’s one of those sequences that has probably played out on corporate floors around the world, but one which naturally commands the terse syntax of cinema. Anger is rarely as articulate, but it is in every other way, cinematic. We've all been disgruntled workers at some point in our life, which makes the audacity of the sequence as relatable as it also feels garnished. Fair Play is a taut, enthralling and ultimately shattering portrayal of a workplace romance. Moreover, its feminist encasing makes it that discomforting question we’ve possibly never asked as a matter of navigating workplace ethics. It’s inconvenient to dip in the company sauce, but what if only one of you were to make it back out?

Directed by debutant Chloe Domont, Fair Play begins with a provocation itself. A throbbing, intimate scene between a couple is cut short, after the woman realizes she has just had her period. Blood is exhibited, but also uncharacteristically ignored. Only a female director could provoke by casually absolving the female body of its exhibitionist value. It’s shocking because it’s treated without shock. The couple are Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), two colleagues working at a ruthless Wall Street hedge fund. Both have gone against company policy and the baseline stigma of co-workers seeing each other. To ensure nobody gets a sniff of their romance, Emily and Luke go to ridiculous lengths to curtail suspicion. Even though they live together, they travel separately, arrive in office at different times, ask numbing ‘how was your weekend’ questions and barely acknowledge each other’s presence. It feels implausible but sets up the rest of the film’s two thrilling acts.

After a senior trader is let go, the hedge fund looks to promote someone from the floor. Emily overhears it might be Luke, except, in the most heretic of twists it turns out to be her. This twist of ego-rustling proportions cascades into series of events that though predictable in a sense, are utterly absorbing to witness. Both Luke and Emily turn into fierce competitors, except both handle the sprained nerve of competition, in distinctly inelegant ways. Fair Play doesn’t want to interrogate why people succeed or fail, but it wants to exhibit how gender, sexuality and corporate success are coiled in deeply unsettling ways. No ladder, so to speak, is built without the brittleness of ego and gender folded into it.

Fair Play feels ugly despite its overt sensual tone because we see it through Emily’s eyes. As the lone woman, who also happens to be witty and smart mind you, Emily juts out as a woman who wants to rise in a world created by men. Her office is a pool of jock tropes with handsomely suited men vulgarly disseminating information, all around her. Does money automatically make you depraved and loathsome? Emily’s growth is expectedly coloured by her gender. The rumours float around, like smelly clouds of envy. But what makes Fair Play so bold and direct is the fact that it asks, what if one those envious men was the man you chose for yourself?

Both Dynevor and Ehrenreich are brilliant in a film that builds tension with ease. There is an obvious feminine shade to its viewpoint, but it doesn’t exactly spare its female lead either. For Emily, in her moments of resentment, reacts by playing into the hands of the men around her. Her agency, her language of retaliation sadly, is masculine in nature. In a scene she chooses to go to a strip club and pretends to enjoy it because men around her assume she won’t. It’s the tragedy of breaking into the world of men, maybe, that no glass ceiling is high enough to warrant their approval. They just manufacture others. No amount of rocks hurled at them in rage or resentment might ever be enough. But maybe, they can help crack the toxicity that you, out of love or attraction, can’t foresee.

Fair Play sees Wall Street brokers through the familiar social lens of snobby, elite depravity but what sets it apart is its willingness to explore intimacy, within the geometry of the modern hustle. As to who these people are when they reach home. What if the conquests of the office floor, the failures of it, somehow seep into the bloodstream of the haven they have constructed for themselves? Who are these people, or just about any people who grow so ambitious and shrewd that they make their business their lives as opposed to the other way round. It’s also a film that will hound the very idea of romancing a colleague out of you. Because even though the idea of love itself is pure, added to the punchbowl of relentless careerism, not everything remains fair in love and war/work. Fair Play will make your reconsider an office dalliance, and terrify if you’re already in one. Good luck with that!

Fair Play is streaming on Netflix.