Beth Lisogorsky

I found it a surprisingly profound and intelligent film which surfaced all sorts of existential and mortality reality themes. Bringing in spiritualism and a mystical/supernatural talking animal as a cipher for faith and place in the world in the climate of 1930s England was an interesting lens for a mystery. This is not a whodunnit and at times I wished it was but having that it’s still a smart film.

The premise of Fair Play is simple. The girlfriend gets the job that her boyfriend believes he deserves at the very competitive NYC hedge fund company where they both work. The nuance here is that the boyfriend firmly believes she didn’t earn it, well at least by way of her professional performance. The film suggestively implies that he thinks she slept her way to the title. The story picks up in pace in the third act. The tension between Luke and Emily at peak as his rotting stench of failure at being a decent human/partner and her feeling the sting of his continual spoken and unspoken psychological and verbal abuse rise. Emily, assimilating to the frat atmosphere at work, suggests the work guys go to a stripper club and then once there, complains to them that she never gets any (sex), which apparently translates as crass if a woman says it, but the guys all share a laugh anyways. The couple that together has never had to confront the ugly realities of patriarchy find themselves smack dab in the center of the storm of their making, but really a machination of the world that spit them out. In such a world, Emily can’t win. The system is rigged against her. She’s too beautiful, too smart. “Too bad she’s a woman. What a waste.” you can imagine her male peers at the firm recanting. Luke, however average a person he may be, just might win. And in the battle between Luke and Emily, neither makes it out unscathed.

"But just to be clear, this isn’t a story about love. This is a story about fate or statistics." - Jameela Jamil (Narrator and many other roles in Love at First Sight) Haley Lu Richardson, a Gen Z acting powerhouse and "The White Lotus" S2 standout, and Ben Hardy, who most recently played opposite Sydney Sweeney in "The Voyeurs" prove to us that if there is such a thing as love at first sight, they are the couple to prove the theory and defy any statistics to the contrary. It doesn't hurt that Jameela Jamil, plays a guardian angel/chameleon type character or that comedian and British transplant, Rob Delaney, author the 2022 memoir, A Heart That Works, about loss, is Hadley's (Richardson's character) dad. I didn't expect to cry as much as I did, but then again a story about love, always comes with loss - loss of innocence, youth, people we love, etc. This story is no different. The frequent quoting of statistics and probability in the film helps to temper the concept of fate and anchor it into a more realistic 2023 setting.