Is workplace romance doomed?: Inside Netflix’s provocative thriller Fair Play – and its shocking ending

Pop culture is not short of toxic workplace relationships. Think Bridget Jones and Daniel Cleaver. Think Succession’s Roman and Gerri. Think literally every couple on Grey’s Anatomy. They’ve served as the dramatic bread and butter for countless films and TV shows over the years; goldmines for sexual tension and complex power dynamics.

This is despite the fact that the trajectory of these stories is almost always the same: a meet cute, a honeymoon period fuelled by clandestine corridor kisses, a major logistical or emotional obstacle, a vicious argument that leads to professional implications, a joyful reconciliation or a depressing breakup followed by compulsory career changes. It’s predictable, monotonous, and, after a while, rather irksome. Thank goodness, then, for Fair Play.

The new Netflix thriller is a film that entirely rewrites the workplace romance genre, avoiding repetitive tropes and stereotypes to carefully examine everything that makes these relationships ripe for drama in the first place. Ultimately, this boils down to two things: sex and power, and what happens when the two clash. “This is not a film about female empowerment,” Fair Play’s writer and director Chloe Domont tells me. “It’s about male fragility.”

The film revolves around Emily (played by Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Oppenheimer’s Alden Ehrenreich), a seemingly stable couple who work together at a cutthroat hedge fund. Somehow, they’ve managed to keep their relationship a complete secret – given that it would break company policy. This doesn’t seem to be an issue for them, though. At the start of the film, the pair get engaged. That is until Luke misses out on a promotion that goes to his fiancée instead, meaning he now reports directly to her. Cue an almighty power struggle as Luke finds himself emotionally castrated by Emily’s new role.

What starts out as subtle digs in an attempt to undermine her – he criticises the way she dresses, for example, as well as her attempts to immerse herself in workplace banter – soon become abusive attacks of both the psychological and verbal variety, culminating in an act of violent physical aggression. Finance might be a far cry from Hollywood, but Domont has said that the film, which marks her directorial movie debut, was born out of her own experiences.

“My career started to take off and suddenly [I started having] this fear that my career might cost me my relationship,” she explains. “I’ve mostly dated within my industry and there have been men who, on one hand, adored me for my strengths and ambition, but on the other, there was still this feeling that they needed to get there first or that me being big in any way made them feel small. There was this pain of undermining myself to protect a man.”

Fair Play features an interesting reversal of the typical power dynamic we see take place between men and women at work. According to psychologists, this can cause a wide range of tacit emotional and physical symptoms, particularly for those at the inferior end of the power dynamic. “Usually, if someone has direct power over someone, they can use this power to manipulate, undermine, boss around or humiliate if they want to,” explains psychologist Dr Madeleine Mason Roantree. “This affects the relationship disproportionately and the subordinate is likely to suffer emotional distress and physical symptoms such as high blood pressure, headaches, pain, fatigue, low immune system.” But because the person with direct power in Fair Play is a woman, this is subverted. She is the one made to suffer by her male partner instead of the other way around.

Given that the film is somewhat personal, it might sound surprising that Domont chose to set it within the finance sector, as opposed to the arts industry. After all, the two couldn’t be more different. “I think they are pretty similar,” deadpans Domont. “Both are very male dominated, and the high-stakes nature is the same. There might not always be as much money on the table, but there’s often enough to create intense pressures and this same adrenaline rush that I could tap into, even though I knew nothing about finance.”

For research, Domont spent time with a group of hedge fund managers, some of whom became consultants on the film. She’d take them out for drinks and quiz them on every aspect of their day, later exchanging notes to check for authenticity in the script. Much like Emily in the film, she had to envelop herself in the boys’ club culture that dominates the sector. In one scene, we see Emily going to a strip club with her male colleagues, and partaking in the binge drinking, drug taking, and sexist chit chat that defines such an environment.

After Emily comes home drunk, Luke, seeing a cheque for $575,000 tumble out of her handbag, mocks her for “prancing around” like the newest member of a frat house. “Does that make you feel good?” he asks her. “Powerful? Like one of the boys? Because I’ll tell you something, you don’t look like one of the boys. You look like the hooker they paid to keep them company.”

It’s a brutal line, made even more brutal the following morning, when Emily’s male colleagues are heard jeering over photos of her from the previous evening, calling her a “f***ing freak” and “an animal”. “I really wanted to show what women have to do to keep their seat at the table,” explains Domont. “We have to play ugly to survive. And in some ways, there was no winning out of that situation for Emily. If she had not participated, then the next day, her colleagues would have accused her of having no sense of humour or being uncool; you would see them ostracise her. But then by participating in the debauchery and the degrading of her own gender, it prompts her colleagues to start calling her names. It shows how thin the margin of error is for women in that environment.”

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All this seems that much more unfair when the woman is actually better at her job than most of the men she works with, including her fiancé. For Luke, this is the bugbear he refuses to accept, forcing Emily to belittle herself in an attempt to maintain her relationship. “Her success becomes a poor reflection of his self-worth,” explains Domont. She adds that their specific dynamic still feels relevant in 2023, both in Hollywood and elsewhere, despite societal progressions. “I’m shocked and not surprised at the same time,” she says. “The male ego always feels like a subject that is off limits. Women tiptoe around it not wanting to hurt it, knowing how dangerous a shattered ego can be.”

We see the consequences of those dangers in full, horrifying force towards the end of the film, in which – spoiler alert – Emily is raped by Luke. It’s a shocking moment that, in retrospect, feels like the inevitable conclusion Fair Play has been slowly building towards. Luke’s resentment and insecurity have metastasized into brutish, animalistic violence. “I set out to make a thriller about power dynamics in relationships at the ugliest levels,” explains Domont. “So for me, it always had to escalate to that scene because the only way for Luke to reclaim the power from Emily at that point in the film is through physical dominance. Because ultimately, sexual assault isn’t about sex, it’s about power.”

As difficult a scene as it is to watch, it’s a vital one when it comes to driving home the intentions of Domont’s film, which is to create conversation around a subject we’re often told to ignore. She has already received countless messages and emails from women who’ve said they connect to Emily’s experience and feel grateful to finally see it so articulately explored on screen.

Psychologically, there are benefits to this, too. “I think it can be helpful to see toxic relationships in film and TV, especially if there are solutions that resolve things,” adds Dr Mason Roantree. “It’s not uncommon for people to feel isolated in toxic relationships, particularly if they’re happening at work, and to not share what’s going on with colleagues. But when you can see others share in your toxic experience, it becomes easier to gain confidence to stand up to it.”

For Domont, it has been rewarding, too, hearing how men have responded to the film. “Younger men come out of it feeling a bit shaken,” she says. “It has them asking, ‘Has this ever been me?’. Whereas the older men, I feel, have been more open about it. I recently came out of a screening and found a group of men in their fifties and sixties sharing their experiences, for example.”

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Domont hopes even more conversations open up once Fair Play is inevitably embraced by Netflix subscribers. “The reason I wrote this was because it was not something I felt I could confront in my own life,” she says. “I still don’t think men and women have figured each other out. We don’t understand each other’s pain. And as much as I think women are a victim of a system that works against them, I think that in some ways, men are victims too, because what defines their role is a relic of the past. And there’s no replacement for that yet. That said, I don’t think that’s an excuse; men need to stop weaponising their insecurities against women.”

As for her views on workplace relationships and whether or not they can work, she remains sceptical, particularly if they are heterosexual partnerships. “I haven’t seen it where there’s not tension there on some level,” she says. “[But] I’m not saying it’s not possible, particularly with future generations being raised without these ingrained traditional gender ideas.”

Competition and jealousy will always exist between the genders on some level, but the stakes could be different in the future. “Like, Luke could have been jealous of Emily getting the job but he wasn’t threatened,” explains Domont. “I think reaching that level of equality will be the big difference.”

‘Fair Play’ is streaming on Netflix