Chloe Domont’s first film watches a secret office romance curdle when she is promoted over him, and for an hour it is as sharp as anything in the genre. Then it decides who the villain is and stops looking.
Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are analysts at a Manhattan hedge fund, and they are engaged, which nobody at work is allowed to know. Chloe Domont, writing and directing her first film, opens on the proposal, in a bathroom at a wedding, with her period blood on his face and both of them laughing about it. It is a good start: two people who find each other’s mess funny. Then a portfolio manager is marched off the floor, everyone decides Luke has the job, and Emily is called in and given it instead. She walks home at two in the morning to tell him.
For about an hour Fair Play is as sharp as the notices say. Domont understands that the damage will not be done by shouting but by small things: how long Luke takes to say congratulations, whose name Campbell (Eddie Marsan), the boss, remembers and whose he does not, who ends up making dinner that night. Then the film decides that Luke is the problem and spends its second half proving it, and it gets less interesting as he gets worse. It is worth seeing for the first hour and the two leads, and we would not send you in expecting the film most critics saw.
The leads do the work. Dynevor plays Emily as someone who wants the job and wants him not to mind, and who slowly realises she cannot have both, and she lets us watch her working out which to give up. Ehrenreich is doing something harder. Luke says all the right things, tells her she deserves it, offers to cook, and his face arrives at each line a half-second after his mouth. We watched him take the news in the kitchen and felt the film tighten around us, because we knew then exactly where it was going and could not look away from him getting there. Marsan, as Campbell, barely raises his voice and is the most frightening person in the building.
Menno Mans shoots the trading floor as glass, grey light and screens, everyone visible to everyone else, and shoots the couple’s flat close and slightly too dark, so the place where they are supposed to be safe feels cramped. Steve Summersgill’s production design gives the office nothing personal to hold on to and gives Emily’s new room a door, which turns out to matter more than anything on the desks. Kate Forbes dresses her sharper by the week and leaves Luke in the same suits. Brian McOmber’s score is mostly a low pulse and has the sense to stay out of the arguments. Franklin Peterson cuts the office fast and the flat slow, which is the right way round.
The trouble is the script. Domont stacks the deck. Emily is allowed doubt, tact, a bad night out with the men and a phone line to a mother (Geraldine Somerville) who only wants to talk about the wedding. Luke is allowed a grievance, and then more grievance, and nobody around him says anything that might complicate it. By the last half hour the film has left observation behind for the mechanics of a thriller, and we will not describe where those mechanics take it. We can say that we were angry by the end, partly at Luke, as intended, and partly at the film for making him so easy to be angry at. A story about two people who used to like each other should hurt more than this one does.
Domont knows the films she is answering. The office is the one from Wall Street (1987) with the braces taken off, and the bedroom scenes owe something to the erotic thrillers of the following decade, though she is a good deal less interested in the sex than they were. What she adds is the domestic detail: who cooks, who pays, who has to lie to whom at work and how well. Those are her best scenes and there are not quite enough of them.
It is an 18, and it earns the certificate in the final stretch rather than the first. Watch it with someone whose salary you know. You will find out quite quickly which of you is Luke.
