When it comes to sound, Fair Play starts with a banger and ends with a bang.
The corporate thriller from writer-director Chloe Domont kicks off with the mother of all horny disco needle drops: Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” Summer’s breathy moans and vows of love drop us right into the seemingly perfect relationship between hedge fund analysts Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich). When we meet them, they’re blissed out on love, all of five minutes away from getting engaged in a public bathroom after some unexpected period sex.
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But for Domont, opening with “Love to Love You Baby” isn’t just a way to establish the romance between Emily and Luke — it’s a way to hint at the darker side of their love.
“As exciting and thrilling as love is, it’s also haunting and taunting,” Domont told Mashable in a video interview. “I think there’s an element of that in the tone of the song to me. Love is all those things, and I think I show that in the movie.”
The Summer classic is just one of many auditory tactics Domont uses to create tension throughout Fair Play, which sees Emily and Luke’s relationship fester when Emily receives a promotion Luke believed he was getting.
“I wanted to create a sound design that keeps you on edge,” Domont explained. “The cityscapes are quite piercing and violating and assaulting on some level, which I think creates this anxiety-inducing feeling.”
Fair Play sound designers Ugo Derouard and John Warrin work with a soundscape that would feel at home in a horror movie, with creaking pipes and floorboards becoming more prominent as Emily and Luke grow further and further apart. “We start to feel the cracks in their building as the cracks in their relationship form,” said Domont.
Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich in “Fair Play.”
Credit: Sergej Radovic / Courtesy of Netflix
Brian McOmber’s score also fuels the increasing strain between Luke and Emily, foregoing resolved notes completely, according to Domont. “The idea is that if we used resolved notes, then you think that the story will resolve, and it releases some tension,” she said. “Brian and I talked about wanting to create this feeling that [the score] is never releasing any tension.”
Dissonance also became crucial to the score. “When you pair two notes that don’t belong together, and then you hear them together, it creates this feeling of unease,” Domont said. “So that’s what we did with the score quite a bit, and I think it helps with that ballooning tension and that feeling of anxiety.”
These tension-building tools don’t let up until Fair Play‘s very last scene, in which Emily retaliates against Luke for raping her, humiliating her at work, and then pretending like what he did didn’t matter. “For me, it’s not about female revenge. This is just about holding a man accountable,” Domont said.
The scene reaches a fever pitch when Emily slashes Luke’s arm with a kitchen knife. When he finally apologizes and admits he’s nothing, she demands he wipe the blood off her floor and leave. Her final demands are punctuated by a quick exhale of relief, followed by the thud of the knife hitting the floor. This one-two punch of sound is the final resolution of a film that has denied us any up to this point, and as Domont says, it’s all a result of Emily reclaiming the power and agency Luke has taken from her.
“Ultimately for me, this film is more than being a film about female empowerment: It’s really a film about male fragility. So once [Emily] gets [Luke] to mutter the words, ‘I’m nothing,’ that’s when the movie resolves,” Domont explained.
She continued: “In terms of the last shot and the last exhale and knife drop, that’s her final release of the whole experience. Ending on the exhale, that’s the first time throughout the film that Emily can actually breathe.”
Fair Play is now streaming on Netflix.
