The fire emoji was a common sight in tweets about the new corporate thriller “Fair Play,” which debuted Friday at the Sundance Film Festival.
The fire emoji was a common sight in tweets about the new corporate thriller “Fair Play,” which debuted Friday at the Sundance Film Festival.
The movie follows two ambitious analysts at a cutthroat hedge fund, played by “Bridgerton’s” Phoebe Dynevor and “Solo’s” Alden Ehrenreich, who are also in a passionate and secret relationship. Several steamy scenes had some declaring the return of the erotic thriller.
Film historian Karina Longworth, whose podcast “You Must Remember This” recently delved into the erotic thriller moment of the 1980s, tweeted that “It does for the 2020s what ‘Fatal Attraction’ did for the late 80s.”
Chloe Domont, who wrote and directed the film, said she didn’t set out to make an erotic thriller, per se.
But “I did set out to make a thriller about gender power dynamics within a relationship that happens to be highly sexual,” Domont told The Associated Press on Saturday in Park City. “I think the execution of that intention ended up flipping the erotic thriller genre on its head.”
Dynevor, in only her second film role, said that when she read Domont’s script, she saw herself and a lot of women she knows in her character, Emily, who seems to be the sole female at the company. She’s made even more aware of this when she gets promoted over Ehrenreich’s Luke.
“How she navigates work life in a very male-dominated industry and how she navigates her relationship and, you know, in many ways has to make herself smaller in order to make other people feel comfortable, I could relate to that,” Dynevor said.
Ehrenreich’s character comes from a more privileged background than Emily.
