The Assistant
Directed by:
Kitty GreenScreenplay:
Kitty GreenCinematography:
Michael LathamComposer:
Tamar-KaliCast:
Matthew Macfadyen, Julia Garner, Dagmara Dominczyk, Kristine Froseth, Makenzie Leigh, Noah Robbins, Alexander Chaplin, Lou Martini Jr., Purva Bedi (more)Plots(1)
The Assistant follows one day in the life of Jane, a recent college graduate and aspiring film producer, who has recently landed her dream job as a junior assistant to a powerful entertainment mogul. Her day is much like any other assistant’s — making coffee, changing the paper in the copy machine, ordering lunch, arranging travel, taking phone messages, onboarding a new hire. But as Jane follows her daily routine, she, and we, grow increasingly aware of the abuse that insidiously colors every aspect of her work day, an accumulation of degradations against which Jane decides to take a stand, only to discover the true depth of the system into which she has entered. (Bleecker Street Media)
(more)Reviews (2)
A study of the effects of toxic masculinity cleverly done without the aggressor even being in the picture. Kitty Green works only with the effects of the manipulative structure he has created around himself, focusing attention on the person who is on the sidelines, enough to not be physically affected, but not enough to be able to ignore the consequences. The Assistant cleverly works with perspective and framing, which is sometimes very subjective, sometimes detached. The contrast creates an unsettling effect, which in some ways is actually frustrating, because where the viewer demands detail, he gets none. And when the viewer does get it, it's fragments. There are some subtle flaws in the staging and disturbing literalness in an otherwise enigmatic concept that betray that this is a debut, but a masterful debut nonetheless.
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This devastating minimalist drama is eloquent in and of itself, but it also coincidentally serves as a complement to the excellent horror film The Invisible Man, not only because both films’ central aggressor is in some way invisible and that both draw attention to people who had been previously overlooked. Whereas The Invisible Man was astonishing and frightening, but in the end offered a properly genre-based pressure valve for the topics of toxic relationships and domestic and sexual violence, The Assistant is paralysing and depressing as it gradually maps the system of abuse of power and harassment as a terrifyingly normalised and unexpectedly extensive swamp.
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