Fair Play (2023)

Fair Play is special because it turns a private love story into a pressure-cooker thriller, using the fluorescent glare of a Manhattan hedge fund to expose how ambition can corrode intimacy one sharp glance at a time. Chloe Domont directs with a cool, confident grip, building dread not through twists but through the accumulating weight of tiny humiliations, power shifts, and the kind of workplace smiles that feel like knives. Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich are electric together—tender enough to make you believe in the relationship, volatile enough to make you fear what it’s becoming—while the film’s sleek style and ratcheting tension keep it humming like a high-stakes trade. It’s not for everyone, though: the material is intense and includes sexual violence and emotionally brutal conflict, but if you can handle a dark, modern erotic thriller with real bite, it’s the kind of movie that grabs you and doesn’t let go.

Fair Play is clearly aiming for a slick, pressure-cooker thriller about ambition, power, and how a “perfect” couple can rot from the inside when the workplace turns them into competitors. When it sticks to the corporate tension and the slow, ugly shift in their relationship, it’s sharp, well-acted, and genuinely uncomfortable in a purposeful way. But be warned: it escalates into very intense, sometimes hard-to-buy territory, and the final stretch can feel more like a provocation than a believable unraveling, with some viewers finding it overcooked and a bit predictable. If you’re not up for graphic relationship toxicity and sexual violence, or you want a more nuanced psychological drama rather than a shock-forward thriller, this one may leave you frustrated rather than thrilled.