Alden Ehrenreich wears an IWC Portugieser

At Sundance in January 2023, Netflix paid 20 million dollars, after a bidding contest, for Chloe Domont's first feature. Fair Play puts two hedge fund analysts, Phoebe Dynevor's Emily and Alden Ehrenreich's Luke, in a secret relationship and then an engagement, and detonates both with one personnel decision: the promotion Luke assumed was his goes to Emily. The film tracks the resentment from workplace tension to his public drunkenness at their own engagement party to a violent assault, with Eddie Marsan's Campbell, the fund's chief executive, presiding over the cull. It runs 113 minutes.

Luke's watch is an IWC Portugieser in steel, white dial, on a steel bracelet, identified by Montres de Luxe, which added its own professional judgment: very likely a product placement. In a trading floor still the watch rides his left cuff, steel on steel as described. The model's history is better than most origin stories because the records survive. In the late 1930s two Portuguese watch wholesalers, Rodrigues and Teixeira, came to Schaffhausen asking for a large steel wristwatch with the precision of a marine chronometer, and IWC answered by putting its pocket watch Calibre 74 into a 41.5 millimeter case: Reference 325, of which the company built 309 examples between 1939 and 1951. The first one delivered did not go to Portugal. It went to a wholesaler in Odessa, in February 1939, and Portugal did not receive its first until 1942.

So the watch named for one destination made its debut somewhere else entirely, which is roughly the film's plot: the title Luke had already counted as his own is delivered to the woman across the desk. Critics, mostly admiring, filed Fair Play alongside the nail-biting thrillers of the nineties.