After scoring rave reactions on the festival circuit, Netflix decided that shelling out $20 million for erotic thriller Fair Play was an investment worth making, and it could end up parlaying into potential awards season recognition for a movie that currently holds a 90 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Elden Ahrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor star as a couple who slowly begin to see their love turn sour as the cutthroat world of finance threatens to drive them apart and irrevocably damage their power dynamic. It hardly sounds like the sort of thing to get users hot under the collar, but writer and director Chloe Domont has been giving it the hard sell after admitting she wanted audiences to feel as though they’ve been slapped, strangled, and choked.
Initially scheduled to premiere on Netflix on Oct. 13, Fair Play has ended up coming quicker than expected after being shifted forward to the 6th of the month. That pits it against the theatrical debut of The Exorcist: Believer, but as we’ve seen innumerable times in the past, cinematic eroticism is impossible for subscribers to ignore.
Expect this one to be a massive hit in its first weekend, then, especially when it comes bearing a stellar critical reception that’s already intimated that it’ll be a cut above the usual skin-showing titles that land on Netflix with reckless abandon and invariably find themselves rocketing right to the very top of the worldwide watch-list in short order.
Obviously, that’ll be the case once again, except this time it’ll be because of a good film.