Kitty Green’s suffocating portrait of workplace
Sexual Abuse shifts the spotlight away from the Harvey Weinsteins and on to the culture that enables themFollow our countdown of the 50 best films of 2020The horrors and headlines of the
Harvey Weinstein exposé, and the torrent of #MeToo stories of sexual abuse, harassment and workplace misogyny it unleashed, are by now cemented in public consciousness, a scandal that shocks without surprise. But The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green’s claustrophobic, chilling feature about the poison dripping through one day at a toxic production company, distils the Weinstein story into one of the most gripping, unsettling movies of the year – by shifting the spotlight. The film changes focus thrillingly, from the famous bad men to the cultures, assumptions and hierarchies of power that enabled them; from the perpetrator, victim or journalist to the liminal, compromised position of low-level adjacency.
Julia Garner (Ozark) is brilliant as Jane, an archetypical young female assistant at a Weinstein-esque production company in
New York, fresh out of university and hungry to prove herself in a cut-throat industry. Over the course of one overlong winter’s day at the office (be the first to arrive and last to leave, she’s told), Jane’s radar for something rotten at the company, from its unnamed, feared boss to its front-office boys’ club to the boss’s orbit of young
Women, escalates from pings of doubt to a full roar.