The Assistant

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

[mr_rating_result]

“The Assistant” by Kitty Green (“Ukraine Is Not a Brothel”) is a Hopper painting set in motion that reserves its punch for the very end. The film is excellent and Julia Garner heads this eerie character study reminiscent of David Fincher and the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.

Jane (Garner) is a recent grad student who lands a job at a Hollywood mogul’s office. She is dedicated and professional with nearly every move measured and calculated. Jane makes the morning smoothie, prints the schedule and payroll and makes the travel arrangements. Things go smoothly until she begins to notice that her surroundings are a bit off kilter: in her peripheral vision she sees the male assistants (Jon Orsini and Noah Robbins) snicker over an eavesdropped phone call. A moment later, she receives a muffled phone call full of insult and profanity. She then writes an apology by email as the men look over her shoulder.

Later during break, she cleans the office table of some half eaten pastries. One sweet roll is untouched and she takes it. Abruptly she is startled by the door. Two male clients enter the room and regard Jane with affront and disdain as if she were an unwelcome rodent, catching her with a pastry in her mouth.

During the passing days, she sees numerous women pass through the office door, not leaving for an hour or more. She sees boxes for medical syringes and catches an earring on the office sofa.

The camera is a character in the film and is often placed above or beside her as if to make her seem a potential beetle under a microscope—pale and isolated.

Like a figure in Kafka, the semi-jarring episodes in Jane’s surroundings are just out of reach. Meetings are muted and rushed. Faces are obscured and men are shown from the back with only their feet visible.

Matthew Macfadyen is most shocking as a patronizing HR man. Jane is in a very unfriendly Wonderland (complete with odd children) with nowhere to turn. Even the conversations with her parents are stilted and uninspired.

With all of the office doors ajar, half glimpsed moments and fleshy kaleidoscopic sight it becomes evident that Jane is cut off, left in a subterranean realm of subjective hearsay and half-truths, and this perhaps is what many women undergo in bringing charges of harassment whether explicitly sexual or psychological.

“The Assistant” is a finely tuned and apprehensive film on point with “Bombshell” but far more potent in its gradual sting.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com