Everyone is so wrong about Netflix’s ‘erotic thriller’ Fair Play

polygon.com:

Usually, when a movie is broadly mischaracterized, a studio has deliberately misrepresented it in marketing materials to broaden its appeal or just didn’t know how to make its real nature clear. But in the case of Fair Play — a tense, needling relationship drama currently streaming on Netflix — the marketers are off the hook. A wrongheaded narrative started to build around Chloe Domont’s debut feature when it first screened at the Sundance Film Festival back in January 2023, before Netflix even acquired it. Some critics convinced themselves that Fair Play represented a kind of renaissance for the erotic thriller genre. It’s nothing of the sort — and pretending that it is one hurts the actual movie.

Fair Play follows a couple of young financial analysts at a small but ruthlessly successful Wall Street hedge fund. Emily (Phoebe Dynevor from Bridgerton) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich of Solo: A Star Wars Story infamy) are madly in love, share an apartment, and get engaged in the movie’s opening minutes. But they take separate trains to work, where they pretend they don’t know each other, so they don’t fall afoul of company policy. They expect Luke to get promoted, but when Emily is chosen instead, awkwardness begins to curdle into resentment — and then worse.

To be fair to the critics claiming Fair Play is an erotic thriller, it does have some echoes of the subgenre’s sleazy 1980s and ’90s heyday. In movies like Indecent Proposal and Disclosure — and probably some others that didn’t star Demi Moore — this kind of battle-of-the-sexes workplace framing was common, in tandem with an aspirational, thrusting, yuppie milieu and an obligatory twist of deception. Fair Play has a couple of big, bracingly frank sex set-pieces, too, which