Fair Play (2023 | USA | 113 minutes | Chloe Domont)

first take: Focused on the taut relationship dynamics when the unexpected half of an illicit couple gets the big promotion at the financial firm where they work, Fair Play kinda feels like a condensed season of Industry, in a good way.

We’re introduced to Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) in the throes of passion and the beginnings of a secret engagement. Analysts at the same high-pressure hedge fund, undisclosed relationships are forbidden, so despite sharing the same New York apartment they take pains to conceal their arrangement. Different trains to work, barely speaking at the office, but the heady optimism of young lust leaves them certain they’ll be able to come clean once they’ve both risen to the “fuck you” ranks of the firm’s cutthroat ladder.

In her feature debut, writer-director Chloe Domont drops us into the familiar milieu: open desk plan analysts looking at charts on double monitors, whispering financial sounding things, always with an eye to the glass offices. Today’s senior-level meltdown — we see one play out, office equipment obliterated by a golf club, while junior staffers sit through a bland corporate responsibility training video — is tomorrow’s shot at promotion. Rumors on the floor suggest that Luke’s next in line and the couple celebrates with champagne-soaked shower sex. However, a late night whiskey rendezvous with the big boss (Eddie Marsan) flips the script: it’s Emily who’s getting the coveted new office.

Alden Ehrenreich plays the supportive boyfriend with an impressive mix of lingering disappointment, supportive optimism at home, and increasing desperation at being left behind and thrust into a subordinate role at work. Meanwhile Phoebe Dynevor expertly embodies her character’s blossoming sense of her own agency, embracing her expertise, and drink dives into the boys club of upper management. As their homelife devolves and workplace becomes ever more tense, a looming engagement party heightens the increasingly taught study of psychosexual power dynamics.

Impressively, Domont steadily builds tension without ever letting this acting showcase boil all the way over into overt melodrama. Even as behavior becomes more extreme, the director keeps a sense of xcontrol while her characters lives are spinning out of it. Assured cinematography brings us into the amber hued corridors of power, contrasting the signifiers of influence in a packed city and sterile workplace with a shared apartment with limited privacy. It creates a living, breathing world for the drama as it speeds headlong into a tricky resolution, a too-rare feat in much festival fare.

---