air Play begins with the start of one marriage and the promise of another. Luke and Emily (Alden Ehrenreich and a revelatory Phoebe Dynevor), young hedge-fund analysts in love, are at his brother’s wedding when a period blood-stained quickie in the bathroom leads to an earlier-than-planned engagement: the ring Luke had planned on proposing with pops out of his jacket pocket. Emily accepts; dazed by bliss, Luke slides the ring on the wrong finger.
It’s a charming introduction to a couple for whom this kind of romantic happiness will soon run increasingly dry. Shortly into Fair Play, the firm where they both work, so cutthroat that the longest people typically stomach staying is three years, gives Emily the portfolio-manager promotion Luke had been certain he’d had on lock. He initially puts up a front of excitement — albeit not very convincing excitement — for her. Then the little comments betraying his resentment start dribbling in. He can’t fathom that her promotion wasn’t preceded by her getting hit on. He suggests that her responding to late-night messages from a new superior means she wants to sleep with him. He ponders how anyone could professionally take her seriously when she so often shows up to work dressed like “a cupcake.” Never mind that when rumors had spread before Emily’s leveling-up that the promotion was probably going to Luke, she’d been celebratory for him, genuinely glad to see him and not her move up.
Fair Play, writer-director Chloe Domont’s debut feature movie, is a drama with the lift of a thriller. Briskly paced, it’s made tense by the getting-worse friction in Luke and Emily’s once-healthy relationship, and Emily’s misguided efforts to try helping Luke ascend at their firm without divulging the true nature of the relationship they’ve been keeping a secret. (Emily quickly learns, once she’s above him, that he’s a nepotism hire, prone to losing the firm millions, and considered by his superiors about as useful as a mediocre gardener. They hope he flames out faster than they can fire him.) Perceptively dramatized by Domont, Emily struggles to navigate not only a tricky professional landscape where she has to be hyper-conscious of being taken seriously because of her gender, but also a personal life where she’s made to minimize her accomplishments for fear of infringing too much on the bruised male ego at home. It seems that until Emily’s promotion, Luke had had almost no idea he’d been underperforming at work to the point of being on thin ice. It’s like he can only see it now because Emily can.
Much has been made about how Fair Play — as much an absorbing end-of-a-relationship drama as a study of a woman trying to thrive in a male-dominated professional arena — feels like something of a throwback to the erotic thriller, a subgenre that particularly flourished in the 1980s and early ‘90s with movies like Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and The Last Seduction (1994).
It’s a capacious label at face value, technically hospitable to any thriller in which sex plays a key role. But the classic-sense premise probably coming to mind for those familiar with the genre can be boiled down to an ill-judged decision by (usually) a straight man to get involved with (usually) a straight woman who very likely poses a great danger to them because of a powerful attraction. Images of what normally constitutes an erotic thriller are indebted to film noir and pulp; they usually hinge on dramatic extremes. In Fatal Attraction, for instance, the danger comes from a married man having an affair with a woman who turns out to be “crazy” and homicidal. In Basic Instinct, it comes from a woman, bisexual in the kind of provocative way written to tease straight-male fantasies, potentially being an ice pick-wielding serial killer.
Fair Play doesn’t at first seem to have much in common with these movies. Though frank about sex in its dialogue, it’s fairly PG-13 in its actual depiction of it, and its conceit feels too plausible in comparison to the sense of the heightened the erotic thriller traditionally radiates. But then it does the more you think about it. It distorts rather than complements old tropes the way a more recent example like, say, The Voyeurs (2021) had. It’s an erotic thriller ably adjusting familiar recipes. It’s the man causing the personal and professional havoc, for reasons feasible rather than undergirded in exaggerated gendered fear. And there’s an old-fashioned sense of the film wanting to prompt op-eds and after-movie discussions where those in conversation make cases, either because of agreement or devil’s-advocate fun, for each person in the couple. (One hopes that actual couples participating in that kind of debate are in sync where it counts.)
Of all movies classified under the classic erotic-thriller banner, it’s 1985’s Jagged Edge that probably has the most in common with Fair Play, mostly because of its shared gender flip, though its premise — that a woman lawyer gets unwisely involved with the man credibly accused of murder she is defending because she’s attracted to him — still hinges on the thriller-movie sensationalism Fair Play eschews. Eschews to a point: Fair Play wraps up satisfactorily though with the type of big-statement explosiveness that feels slightly out of step with the texturally truer-to-life workplace and romantic dynamics Domont portrays more astutely than she does with the occasionally appearing heavy hand. But I didn’t begrudge her that much for giving into the quasi-revenge-movie ending she does. Fair Play is otherwise a sharp, superbly performed movie that introduces Domont as a smart filmmaker more than simply “promising.” It also assuages a need — a need I’ve seen invoked in a few reviews lauding the movie — for the sort of effective, mid-budget “movie for adults” harder and harder to come by.
I was walking my roommate’s dog on one of the paths of a trail system in Seattle the other afternoon when I suddenly noticed a coyote about 20 feet in front of us. I picked up the dog and walked in the opposite direction as quickly as I could; the coyote followed us a while, even after we crossed the street, before we lost track of each other. I wondered later how the encounter might have played out had we not been in a public place, in the light of day, not too far from my car.
In Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, which I saw a few hours later, the main characters are trapped someplace where they are barraged constantly by potential predation, escape routes so far out of reach that it would be comical if it weren’t so scary. The movie opens with its leads, backpackers wandering through Australia named Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick), discovering while partying on a yacht that they don’t have enough cash remaining for their seemingly itinerary-less trip to sustain them. They go to an employment agency looking for a quick fix; the only available option on this short a notice is bartending positions at a pub in a hamlet so rural that there is neither WiFi anywhere nor a bus that goes to town any sooner than every couple of days.
They take it; they also quickly learn that the “male attention” briefly alluded to by the agency worker was more of a warning than it sounded. Masculine hostility at their temporary new gig is a constant from the jump, their perpetually drunk new boss (Hugo Weaving) calling Hanna a “cunt” moments after first announcing himself and the mostly male patrons proving either unsettlingly leering or flat-out inclined to verbally harass. (Even the most amiable of the regulars, a guy about Hanna’s and Liv’s age played by Toby Wallace, introduces himself with an appallingly crass joke.) The only permanent female residents in town seem to be the boss’ wife (Ursula Yovich) and a barfly (Barbara Lowin). They respectively do what they can to look out for the young friends and egg on the male clientele’s worst impulses.
Thrillers about women in trouble tend to make it a necessity for said women to be violated and/or successfully vengeful to fully “legitimize” the torment they experience for so much of the movie. The Royal Hotel for a long time seems like it’ll build to the sort of bloody climax movies of escalating tensions like this one so often do. But it will ultimately, and refreshingly, dispense with expectation. Avoiding obvious narrative beats, it instead makes it a point to simply wallow in the acute discomfort of being a young woman in an aggressive, male-heavy space where the only real, hardly foolproof means of deescalation are feigning one-of-the-guys ease or not reacting at all. (As she’s written, the more reckless Liv seems to take it all in stride, whereas the more cautious Hanna is obviously on edge — something that makes her even more of a target.)
The ending feels like more of a shrug than probably intended. But that’s forgivable: what precedes it is a movie that so masterfully maintains unease that I wrote in my notes that this had been the most stressed out I’d been in a theater all year. That could, for all I know, not actually be true, but the level of distress The Royal Hotel evokes is so atypically high that I’ll just say that it is.
Peterson Reviews 