The Assistant (Kitty Green)

[Philip J. Fry]

https://media-cache.cinematerial.com/p/500x/qnxcpo0v/the-assistant-movie-cover.jpg?v=1588066446

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9761kQCNWc

IMDb (https://imdb.com/title/tt9000224/) / wiki (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assistant_(2019_film)) / RT (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_assistant_2020) / Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-assistant)

[dreamdead]

A film very focused on the miniature and understated, and on that level it gets my unqualified love. There are some criticisms I've read that the film gets to avoid larger complexities by avoiding ever showing the predatory boss and grappling with that angle, but Green's framing, Garner's face, and the scene between Garner and Matthew Macfadyen all situate the value of the film. Indeed, that scene between Garner and Macfadyen is the centerpiece. Again, it likely could go deeper but it nonetheless succeeds at the level it's cast.

[Ezee E]

I get what the movie is going for, and I appreciate the atmosphere, but there's really not too much that changes after the first fifteen minutes outside of a HR Conversation. Anyone that knows what this movie is going for can predict each beat.

Interesting director, but there's just not much to take from this for me.

[Stay Puft]

When the movie ended, I nodded and said "I agree wholeheartedly" but I've also voted nay because its only real quality is its didacticism. The repetitive and predictable nature of its narrative, as E describes, is a byproduct of that. Is that in itself a bad thing, if art is didactic? I wouldn't say so, but I really wanted more here. Or more of a different dramatic approach. I like the concept on paper, a kind of slow-burn thriller where a character realizes there's danger around every corner (in this case, the mundane horror of workplace alienation and normalized exploitation/abuse in patriarchal and capitalist systems), but I feel there's an irreconcilability between those thematic goals and its trite dramatic structure (a "day-in-the-life" at the office) and aesthetic choices (run-of-the-mill cinematic mimeticism). The result is a contorted narrative that attempts to "realistically" portray the weight of the whole system bearing down on a single person, in a single day, and the drama is borderline incoherent as a result (which is to say, it's purely illustrative and not at all dramatic; I thought the scene with the HR rep was actually the worst for this, just triple-underlining THE POINT). I read an interview with Kitty Green wherein she discussed the formative influence of Chantal Akerman's feminist cinema (prompted by the interviewer directly comparing this to Jeanne Dielman), and I laughed until my soul left my body.