All is fair in love, war, and corporate dealings as Netflix’s upcoming R-rated erotic corporate thriller Fiar Play wowed audiences at Sundance and earned itself a 100% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
RELATED: Do White Male Actors Sell More Movie Tickets?
Fair Play is a buzzy new Netflix thriller that explores the dark side of corporate gender politics and trying to navigate a relationship in a cutthroat world. Director and writer Chloe Domont makes her feature film debut after helming episodes for both Billions and Ballers.
Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are both analysts at a cutthroat financial firm and have been hiding the secret of their relationship and recent engagement from their colleagues and employers because an in-office romance is strictly forbidden.
If that wasn’t already bad enough, when an unexpected promotion opens up and goes to Emily instead of Luke. In that case, their once-sweet relationship starts to sour. What follows are unexpected twists of betrayal, misunderstandings, and more greed than you can imagine possible.
RELATED: Viewers Are Completely Shocked & Confused By New Netflix Whodunit Movie
While the film has a pretty impressive 87% Tomatometer, a score that some movies could never even hope to get, it has impressed audiences even more than it did the critics. The collective audience has given Fair Play a whopping 100%, meaning there wasn’t a single bad review from all the audience members who watched it.
Even calling it “classy-trashy psychological warfare,” is apparently a compliment, as critics sang the praises of the film, referring to it as less of a thriller and more of a “psycho-romance” that explores more than you think it does. While it is 100% a dramatization, it definitely explores something authentic in the corporate world of America, from sexism and misogyny to the expectation of successful women in the corporate environment.
On top of that, the thriller also covers how a young and seemingly stable relationship can be somewhat torn apart when one person receives unexpected success, the other is stagnant, and when gender roles that were either previously established or relatively balanced suddenly become blurred.
RELATED: Uh-Oh! Netflix’s Rebel Moon Is Already Getting Sued
At its finest, Fair Play is a well-thought-out and well-directed look at human behaviour in the cutthroat jungle that we call the corporate world. What people’s greed and corruption will lead them to do to themselves and to others. The film has been described as harkening back to the days of the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 90s, and this is partly due to the thriving sexism in the film and the corporate environment. Some of us would call it outdated, but the narrative that a woman must be doing something under the table to get to the top still permeates the professional world.
Fair Play has been doing theatrical rounds on the film festival circuit for a hot minute now. Still, it will be released on Netflix for streaming on the 6th of October, 2023. Look at this thrillingly dangerous and dramatic romance for yourself, and see if it is worth the 100% Audience rating.
