Fair Play's Ending Explained
At the end of Fair Play, Emily finds that Luke is packed to go to San Francisco for a new job at a venture capital firm. She demands that Luke apologize for raping her and gaslighting her. He refuses to do so and even denies it though she points out her bruised eye. She grabs a kitchen knife and he asks what she wants from him, “I want to go on your fucking knees and beg for mercy.” After he attempts to get the blade, she slashes Luke’s arm. She forces him to apologize and with tears, he asks what he can do to make things right. “I will do anything to make it OK for you,” She responds as she kneels on the floor with him, “Now wipe the blood off my floor, and get out. I’m done with you now.”
In a conversation with Netflix’s Tudum, director Chloe Domont talked about the significance of why Emily slashed her former partner. “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.”
“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.”
Dynevor revealed the process of getting into character to W Magazine. “From a female perspective, I saw myself in Emily, and many of the experiences I’ve been through in a male-dominated environment,” she recounted. “The thing that interested me was how Emily is so isolated by her success—she can’t really enjoy it. It’s something she has to hide. She has to diminish herself and make herself smaller in order to please the men around her.”
As for all the blood, it’s a special callback to the beginning of the film. “For me, it’s a visual metaphor,” Domont told Rolling Stone. “It’s telling the audience: don’t get too comfortable. Even though I’m using it in a funny way in the beginning to bond them, it’s the thing that will turn them apart in the end. In terms of the ending, when I was talking about using and twisting genre, I think that no matter how much you do that you still need to pay it off in the end. The ending is where the message and the genre come together in one final punch. The thriller genre uses violence as a means to solve conflict, so I always felt like it had to go there.”
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, free and confidential help is available. Call the National Sexual Assault Hotline on 1-800-656-4673.
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