Member-only story
Film Review
Fair Play (2023) — a tense thriller exploring power dynamics and gender roles
An unexpected promotion at a cutthroat hedge fund pushes a young couple’s relationship to the brink, threatening to unravel far more than their recent engagement.
Power dynamics, specifically within corporate frameworks, have steadily become ripe subject material for filmmakers looking to make a mark in mainstream media. Whether that be through examinations of corporate harassment — as seen in The Assistant (2019) and She Said (2022), HBO’s hugely successful drama Succession, or searing social critiques such as Dark Waters (2019) — corporate environments have become battlegrounds for the mind, fraught with constant tension. The endless array of moving parts (cutthroat hierarchical competition, the relentless pursuit of profit, an entirely alien set of social norms) also comes loaded with dramatic intrigue, begging filmmakers to make good use of the powder-keg paranoia and viciousness boiling within every cog in the machine.
Enter writer-director Chloe Domont, whose debut feature Fair Play wields every piece of the corporate puzzle in a specifically gendered context to edge-of-your-seat effect. It’s a film of intense confidence on two levels: in taking its story to deranged places and in the cast and crew’s ability to execute it on a precise wavelength. Among many things, Fair Play is primarily a balancing act, measuredly checking the pulse of its narrative suspense before ratcheting things up to a fine line between plausible yet insane and completely off-the-rails. In other words, it’s a film that deals with logical extremes. One that deliberately seems to exchange quietly subdued nuance to depict the absolutes of gendered power dynamics instead when they’re pushed to their absolute limit.
