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Fair Play begins and ends in blood. The first drop leads to romance, the second to accountability. In Chloe Domont’s white-knuckle relationship thriller, everything comes full circle. And the clues are all there — if you know where to look. Ahead, the film’s writer-director breaks down the movie’s climactic ending and all the signs that pointed to its outcome. 

Chloe Domont and Cast Take Us Behind the Scenes of ‘Fair Play’

Let’s start at the bloody beginning.

In one of the first scenes in the film, couple Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) steal away from a family wedding for a sexy interlude in the bathroom, only to realize that Emily has her period. Their steamy moment comes to a screeching halt but gives way to a sweet outcome: Luke gets down on one knee and proposes to Emily before sweeping her off her feet and out a window, away from what he jokingly calls a crime scene. Savor that moment because it’s pretty much the last time you’ll see these two smiling for the next two hours. Soon after their engagement — which they have to keep secret from their mutual employer, a cutthroat hedge fund run by a fearsome boss known as Campbell (Eddie Marsan) — Luke and Emily’s relationship is put to the test. A sudden opening in the upper echelons of the firm pits them against one another for advancement. In a surprise twist, Emily is promoted above Luke, throwing the two into a spiral of jealousy, resentment, and shame that ultimately destroys everything in its path. 

Slobodan Pikula/Netflix

Still, according to Domont, it was important that the audience starts out rooting for the couple. “You [have to] fall in love with the characters during the proposal,” she tells Tudum. “And I thought, ‘What’s the most ridiculous way they could get engaged that makes you adore them?’ For me, it was by covering them in blood. It makes them charmingly dysfunctional and messy and human in a somewhat outlandish way that also grabs the audience by the throat. And then, of course, the blood also tells them, ‘Don’t get too comfortable.’ I thought the foreshadowing of the violence to come was just as important.”

That violence creeps in gradually but steadily. So steadily, in fact, that the couple dismiss their unease until it’s too late. As Emily begins to assert her power, Luke becomes increasingly erratic, undermining her with cutting verbal remarks that escalate into a physical attack after he ultimately loses his job. With nothing left to lose, Luke drunkenly wanders into a meeting led by Emily and reveals the two have been sleeping together before accusing her of sexual harassment as his boss. Things deteriorate even further at the couple’s engagement party that same night: Luke and Emily get into a shouting match, which ends with her breaking a beer bottle on his head. Once more, they find themselves stealing away from family into a bathroom, but unlike that scene at the outset of the film, what begins as a rough consensual sexual encounter turns into rape. 

Slobodan Pikula/Netflix

Does Campbell believe Emily?

The next day, Emily meets with Campbell and addresses Luke’s allegations with a lie of her own. Rather than admitting that the two were in love and planning a life together, she tells her boss that Luke has been stalking her for months and that she feared that coming forward would provoke him. Does Campbell believe her? Domont doesn’t think so.

“Campbell knows that she’s lying, but he doesn’t care because it’s a waste of his time,” she says. “He basically tells her, ‘I don’t care who you kill, I don’t care who you f**k, but do it on your own time, and most importantly leave your dirty laundry at home.’ In his 30,000-foot view of the world, it’s all about the money and protecting his image for their clients, and at the end of the day, blame and accountability in any aspect doesn’t matter. But as Emily sits on this, when faced with Luke one last time, she realizes that accountability does matter, and she’s going to do something about it.”

Why does Emily attack Luke?

When Emily returns home, she finds Luke there with his things packed. He’s moving to San Francisco, where he has secured an interview with a venture capital fund. As he explains his plans, Emily appears increasingly incredulous: Why is he not apologizing for sexually assaulting her? Is he really going to pretend he hasn’t been gaslighting her since she got this promotion? When she confronts him, Luke is shocked and denies that he did any such thing, even after Emily shows him the bruise on her face. Angry, she grabs a knife from the kitchen and forces him to get on his knees and beg for her forgiveness. Though he’s initially reluctant, Luke quickly realizes that Emily means business when she slices his arm. As blood drips on the floor, Luke tearfully apologizes and asks what he can do to make things right. “I will do anything to make it OK for you,” he sobs. As she kneels down next to him, Emily has only one thing to say: “Now wipe the blood off my floor, and get out. I’m done with you now.”

For Domont, that final scene holds the true meaning of the film. “While there are elements of female rage, the last scene is not about female revenge, it’s about holding a man accountable and getting him to face his own inferiority,” she says. “Luke’s inability to own up to that causes both of them so much pain and so much destruction. For me, the whole film really builds up to the moment when Emily finally gets Luke to acknowledge his own failure and his own weakness, when he finally mutters the words ‘I’m nothing’ — because more than being a film about female empowerment, this is really a film about male fragility.”

Sergej Radovic/Netflix

Domont rehearsed this emotionally demanding climax with Dynevor and Ehrenreich multiple times ahead of filming to make sure the actors felt safe and comfortable to let loose. “It was a tricky scene with stunts and special effects and, of course, demanding [in terms of] performance,” she says. To avoid having to interrupt the actors for camera setups, the director brought in a crane to track Dynevor from the moment she enters the apartment to when she says her final line. 

“I wanted Phoebe to lean into Emily’s pain, which ultimately fuels her fury,” says Domont. “And the more we could get Emily’s pain to drive her actions in that final scene, the more empathetic those actions would be. No matter how ugly they are, we as the audience will understand where she’s coming from and why she chooses to act out in this way. Phoebe delivered that on the most heartbreaking level. You feel her pain, and even her love, pulsing through that scene. She knocked it out of the park.”

What happens to Luke and Emily?

Though the movie cuts to black right after Emily’s parting line, Domont understandably has thoughts about where the characters go from there. “I think that’s the last time Emily ever involves herself with a man like that,” she says. “The knife drop for me is a real mic drop — she’s done, she’s over it. She’s going to continue to focus on her career without walking on eggshells, and she’s going to see the red flags before diving headfirst with someone else again.”

As for Luke, Domont sees the violent face-off as the moment that finally breaks through to him. “I think that if Emily had just let him walk out that door without that kind of confrontation, he would have continued to fail upwards, believing his own narrative about how he was wronged and deprived of what he ‘deserved,’ ” she says. “By forcing him to acknowledge the brutality he inflicted on her, as well as face his own failures on a deep emotional level, my hope is that he would actually learn from that and he would, at the very least, do better next time.” 

Even so, the director points to an earlier, bloodless scene in the film as the one she personally finds the most cathartic. “The most gratifying scene to film in terms of Emily biting back [was] when they get into a screaming match around the kitchen counter, when she finally tells him that Campbell wanted to fire him because he’s the one who’s weak,” she says. “Emily fights back with her words, which are arguably more cutting than the literal slice that she gives Luke in the end.”

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