Netflix’s Honest Play has loads of intercourse, but it surely’s not an erotic thriller

Normally, when a film is broadly mischaracterized, a studio has intentionally misrepresented it in advertising and marketing supplies to broaden its enchantment or simply didn’t know the right way to make its actual nature clear. However within the case of Honest Play — a tense, needling relationship drama at the moment streaming on Netflix — the entrepreneurs are off the hook. A wrongheaded narrative began to construct round Chloe Domont’s debut characteristic when it first screened on the Sundance Movie Competition again in January 2023, earlier than Netflix even acquired it. Some critics satisfied themselves that Honest Play represented a form of renaissance for the erotic thriller style. It’s nothing of the kind — and pretending that it’s one hurts the precise film.

Honest Play follows a few younger monetary analysts at a small however ruthlessly profitable Wall Avenue hedge fund. Emily (Phoebe Dynevor from Bridgerton) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich of Solo: A Star Wars Story infamy) are head over heels in love, share an residence, and get engaged within the film’s opening minutes. However they take separate trains to work, the place they fake they don’t know one another, in order that they don’t fall afoul of firm coverage. They anticipate Luke to get promoted, however when Emily is chosen as an alternative, awkwardness begins to curdle into resentment — after which worse.

To be honest to the critics claiming Honest Play is an erotic thriller, it does have some echoes of the subgenre’s sleazy Eighties and ’90s heyday. In motion pictures like Indecent Proposal and Disclosure — and doubtless some others that didn’t star Demi Moore — this type of battle-of-the-sexes office framing was frequent, in tandem with an aspirational, thrusting, yuppie milieu and an compulsory twist of deception. Honest Play has a few huge, bracingly frank intercourse set-pieces, too, which is as uncommon to see in a characteristic movie now because it was frequent again then. However the similarities finish there. Exactly there, with the intercourse.

Honest Play has intercourse in it, but it surely isn’t a horny film, by Domont’s design. As a substitute, it’s intimate — at first in an thrilling and romantic means, then in a means that’s claustrophobic and troubling. It clings near its two leads, finding out them in tight framing or spying on them throughout the workplace utilizing zoom lenses. And it stays of their heads all through, particularly Emily’s.

However the sexual attraction between them isn’t the topic of the film in any respect. It’s a truth of their relationship, clearly acknowledged from the beginning. For a lot of the film’s operating time, although, attraction hardly ever comes into their complicated, creating energy dynamic. Except you rely Luke’s sulky refusals to get it on. At one level, Emily tries to deliver intercourse again within the image with a bad-joke proposition that Luke turns down and later throws again in her face, in a bitter inversion of post-#MeToo gender politics.

Intercourse does finally re-enter their relationship, within the worst means potential. However intercourse isn’t a motivating issue for both of them: They’re pushed by self-image, success, and cash. An erotic thriller (an excellent one, at any price, like Fundamental Intuition) is usually about these items too, however these components are subsumed in and expressed via intercourse and/or sexual jealousy, which must be the characters’ driving drive. (And to some extent, the viewers’ driving drive, too — these are often consciously titillating motion pictures, whereas Honest Play very a lot isn’t.)

A heated, horny environment is important for an erotic thriller, together with a way that intercourse is the one factor the characters can take into consideration. That’s how a film like final 12 months’s trashy Patricia Highsmith adaptation Deep Water, from erotic-thriller baron Adrian Lyne, might be a lot sexier and rather more within the style custom than Honest Play, though Deep Water options much less precise intercourse.

There’s motive why even sharp critics are mislabeling Honest Play. As soon as essentially the most disreputable of business movie genres, the erotic thriller is having fun with a second of reclamation and re-evaluation, because of influential crucial voices like Wesley Morris and Karina Longworth greedy the nettle, because it had been, in a sequence of fascinating, humorous, and attractive podcasts. It’s a enjoyable bandwagon, and it’s pure to need to bounce on it — notably within the context of the unusually sex-free trendy moviegoing expertise. (Though that’s began to vary, even since Honest Play’s Sundance debut: Movies like Ira Sachs’ hypnotic Passages and, reportedly, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Issues are as soon as once more pushing the boundaries of on-screen intercourse, whereas even Christopher Nolan, of all individuals, is getting in on the act.)

Honest Play’s mislabelling is just a disgrace if it obscures what Domont really achieved with the film. It’s a pointy, ambiguous, trenchant movie, with very good performances from Dynevor and Ehrenreich, and a menacing flip from Eddie Marsan as their boss. Ehrenreich, particularly, is fearless in a pathetic function that requires him to invert the hearthrob trajectory he had been on till somebody made the horrible mistake of casting him as a younger model of Harrison Ford.

And whereas Honest Play isn’t a thriller, it’s thrilling to look at, particularly in its risky, horrifying remaining half-hour, which feels prefer it may go wherever. On this film’s airless, grasping, transactional world, poisonous dynamics round gender and energy set the foundations. Intercourse doesn’t stand an opportunity.

Honest Play is streaming on Netflix now.