Following on from the Harvey Weinstien scandal and other instances of sexual abuse and harrassment by the rich and powerful I'm sure movies like "The Assistant" are going to become more common place but I doubt if many of them will be this strange, this unsettling or indeed this good. Although fiction, "The Assistant" looks and feels like it could be a documentary and Kitty Green, whose first feature this is, does indeed come from a documentary background.
The assistant of the title, (a beautifully subdued Julia Garner), is a young woman employed in the New York office of a media mogul, not just as a kind of secretary, but as someone to clean up, (literally), the mess (literally), that her boss leaves behind and to take whatever verbal abuse he dishes out. She is safe, it would seem, from sexual harrasment because, as she's told, 'she's not his type'. The boss himself is never seen on screen.
This is a genuinely frightening film that goes beyond what has come to be known as the #MeToo Movement. It paints a horrifying picture of what powerful people can do to subordinates given the chance, (I know because I too worked with such people but I, at least, had the balls to stand up to them...and not get fired). What distinguishes Green's film is that she never over-dramatizes, (if anything, she holds back almost to the point of boredom), uses actors who are not well-known to us, (a magnificently obsequious Matthew Macfadyen is the best known person on screen), and films it, not as a clammy thriller, but as a fly-on-the-wall slice of life. There is none of the triumphalism of "Bombshell" on display here, just the chilly feeling that an unseen monster is lurking out of camera shot and destroying the lives of everyone around him.
