Inspired by the Harvey Weinstein scandal, The Assistant is a suffocating demonstration of how abusers remain in power

In Kitty Green’s tour de force, what goes unsaid is almost more important than the lines on the screen. The essential is reduced to a silent scream, says Clémence Michallon

Julia Garner as Jane in The Assistant. (YouTube / Bleecker Street)

If you’ve seen the trailer for The Assistant, you might be expecting a high-octane drama, filled with tense conversations, tearful personal dilemmas, and hair-tearing workplace conflicts – a new Bombshell, only set at a film company. But Kitty Green’s 85-minute tour de force is a different kind of beast. It’s a quiet, lean, finely written gut punch – and a suffocating demonstration of how abusers remain in positions of power even when everyone knows.

Jane, portrayed by the pitch-perfect Julia Garner (you might have seen her in Ozark), is an assistant at a New York City-based production company. The film is told through her eyes, over the course of just one day. This is a drastic decision that brings us almost uncomfortably close to Jane, taking us through the minutiae of her day and its endless series of menial tasks and ritualistic humiliations.

Together, we refill a mini-fridge with bottles of expensive water. We make a protein shake for the boss, an elusive man who’s never seen on the screen, though his presence looms over every second of our day. We wipe the crumbs off his desk. We restock his medicine. We field angry phone calls from his wife. We make his flight arrangements.

But The Assistant, which is out in the UK in April, can’t be based on just any day in Jane’s life, or there wouldn’t be a movie. Today – we can feel it – has the potential to be different. The boss appears to have crossed another line, taking a young recruit to a hotel for no good reason. Today is the day things threaten to blow up.

Revealing anything more would be to spoil it, so let’s just say this: during Jane’s confrontation with Wilcock, a seemingly warm HR employee played by Matthew Macfadyen, what goes unsaid is almost more important than the lines on the screen. The essential is reduced to a silent scream.

Macfadyen, whose singular scene plays centre stage in the trailer, exudes an energy strikingly reminiscent of his pathetically villainous Succession character Tom Wamsgans. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that this could be Wamsgans’s previous job – a starter gig before joining the ranks of Waystar Royco.

Jane, though white, educated, and wealthy enough to live in New York, is one of the most marginalised people at her company, where she languishes at the bottom of the food chain. She has little money, absent friends, well-meaning but emotionally out-of-touch parents, the kind of ambition that leaves you vulnerable, and an in-demand job where she could be replaced faster than you can say “blockbuster”. And so she endures one blow to her self-esteem – and to her conscience – after another.

When she’s unable to quell the ire of her boss’s wife – a task that shouldn’t have landed on her to-do list in the first place – the mysterious man above launches into an abusive tirade, which can only lead to a demeaning apology email from the assistant. Her day is one long string of vexations, all resulting from the reign of terror enacted by the very man she’s expected to protect with her silence.

While The Assistant seems to have drawn inspiration from the Harvey Weinstein scandal – and was released in the US just as the former movie mogul’s criminal trial was unfolding in New York City, with Weinstein subsequently being found guilty of third-degree rape and a criminal sexual act in the first degree but cleared of predatory sexual assault – the film never shows or names the invisible boss. In doing so, it elevates its discourse beyond any specific case, delivering a powerful and durable demonstration about workplace harassment as a whole.

If you’ve ever wondered, “How was this person allowed to go on for so long?”, The Assistant shows you the answer.