Fair Play begins and ends in blood. In between, Chloe Domont, making her feature debut, keeps the screws turning on two analysts at One Crest Capital, a Manhattan hedge fund. Emily Meyers (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke Edmunds (Alden Ehrenreich) are lovers, and they hide it from their colleagues. Luke proposes at his brother’s wedding. A few days later a portfolio manager is fired, and the job goes to Emily, not to him.

Everything that follows grows out of that one decision. The film premiered at Sundance on January 20, 2023, reached select theaters on September 29 and landed on Netflix on October 6. Rian Johnson is credited as an executive producer, though nothing here feels borrowed from anyone. What Domont does best is refuse to keep the office and the apartment apart. A trade becomes an argument over dinner. A commission becomes a verdict on the marriage. When Emily receives a $575,000 cheque, Luke sees it and loses all interest in touching her, and the scene says more about the two of them than any speech could.

Dynevor carries this arc well. Emily starts out hesitating for a beat before she says yes to the ring, and she ends up weighing what her own success is going to cost her. Her scenes with Eddie Marsan, who plays Campbell, the firm’s CEO, are the sharpest in the film. When she tries to speak up for Luke at work, it backfires: he makes a bad call that loses the company $15 million, and Campbell takes it out on her. She is the one who gets insulted. It stings because nothing about it is exaggerated.

Ehrenreich has the thankless part. Luke’s resentment builds in small, believable steps: the $3,000 self-help course on asserting yourself at work, the remark that Emily could stand to be more assertive herself, the bed he retreats to after turning down her advances. Each step makes sense on its own. Piled together, they push him toward caricature, and the film seems to want us to dislike him sooner than it needs to.

It is at its best when his pride turns into a moral problem. Luke feeds Emily insider information about a company whose stock the fund could short. She sees the legal danger and points Campbell to a different company instead, and the trade works. She has done the right thing and been proved right, and he cannot forgive her for it.

The film is less sure-footed once it stops talking quietly. Luke bursts drunk into the conference room while Emily, Campbell and Paul are pitching overseas investors, shouts at Campbell for refusing him a promotion and announces the relationship in front of everyone. On paper it makes sense. On screen it plays like a scene staged because the script needs a blow-up, and it leans on shock where the earlier scenes relied on quiet cruelty. The gender politics, too, are sometimes underlined once more than necessary. Rotten Tomatoes puts the balance fairly: Domont’s command of the story is brilliant, even if the argument is pushed a little hard at times.

Brian McOmber’s score keeps the tension simmering underneath. The soundtrack opens with the extended version of Donna Summer‘s “Love to Love You Baby,” a choice that promises the erotic thriller the film partly wants to be. It never quite surrenders to that promise, and I think it is better for holding back.

It was reviewed warmly, and mostly for good reason. Fair Play is uneven and sometimes blunt. But Domont knows how a workplace can leak into a bedroom, and from the first drop of blood to the last she has your attention.

What stays with you afterward is the quiet middle, not the shouting. Two people smile at each other across a kitchen, and both already know who is going to lose.