Film Review: The Assistant
Julia Garner and Kristine Froseth in The Assistant. Photo: PR Supplied.
The debut feature of Melbourne-born screenwriter and director Kitty Green, The Assistant offers a realistic, understated and deeply unsettling look at sexual abuse in the film industry.
The film follows young aspiring producer Jane (a fantastic Julia Garner) over a single, long workday at a large film production company. The film takes its time, following Jane as she performs a series of menial tasks around the office. Certain moments, however, come to stand out as being more significant: a hair tie left on the boss’s floor; an angry call from his wife.
Jane’s day is relayed moment by moment, a series of pieces which come to suggest a frightening whole. In the first glimpse of Jane’s boss’s office, the camera remains outside the doorway, slowly dollying outwards as it focusses on the large, empty desk chair. It’s a shot that would not be out of place in Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man— but Green’s film is a different kind of horror story: less violent, more insidious. It is the story of a young woman put into a difficult, awful position, offering a different point of view to the victim-perpetrator dynamic through which sexual abuse in the entertainment industry is often framed.
The film explores how predators are sustained and abetted, not necessarily by evil cronies but by dynamics of power and ambition within all levels of a company. Perhaps the most chilling scene comes when Jane confides in a higher-level HR figure (Matthew Macfadyen), who, in trying to convince her not to put her industry dreams at risk, appropriates quasi-feminist language: ‘we need more women producers.’ At first, it is unclear whether he truly doesn’t understand what she’s trying to tell him, or whether he is being deliberately obtuse. Both possibilities are unsettling.
The film features very little music, opting instead for a noisy, near-constant soundtrack filled with loudly crinkled paper, the mechanical whirr of the photocopier, and below it all, the constant roar of the city. There is a symbolic lack of clarity to much of this sound: muffled, anonymous voices from the next room; voices and footsteps echoing down corridors; fast babbling in different languages; the warped, raspy voice of an angry boss over a bad phone line. These muffled sounds enhance the frustration of Jane’s position— she is aware that something bad is happening, yet is unable to see the full picture.
While the film’s slow pace and heavy subject matter mean it might not be for everyone, or be particularly rewatchable, it is nevertheless challenging and thought-provoking cinema. The Assistant offers no solutions for the problem it examines-- except that the film itself might be seen as a kind of a solution, or part of it: a bringing to light of the horror of these behaviours so that they might be recognised and hopefully curbed.
Given that real-life stories of abuse and harassment continue to emerge, there will likely be more films that explore powerful men and the power they abuse. The Invisible Man explored the frustrating, entrapping horror of not being believed; The Assistant shows the horror of being believed, but having your words drowned out.
The Assistant will beavailable to Rent On Demand from 24th June from multiply platforms, including:
Foxtel, Google Play, iTunes, Fetch TV, Telstra Bigpond, Sony (Playstation Network), Microsoft & Quickflix