The Assistant
Directed by Kitty Green
Running time: 1hr27 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Julia Garner stars in The Assistant
I’m a huge fan of Succession; it’s one of the great TV shows of the era. But I do sometimes feel uneasy, as I watch it. It’s something to do with the seductive powers of fiction. The powerful billionaires depicted are complete shits but also kinda charming and funny and sympathetic: it makes me like them. This isn’t the show’s problem — it’s a fictional show! A brilliant one! — but for balance, I was elated to discover The Assistant, a film which deliberately excludes the powerful person at the top of the pyramid, to focus on the lowly assistant drawn unwillingly into enabling a Weinstein Company-style web of abuse and collusion.
We never see the face of the boss of the company depicted in The Assistant, and we rarely hear him. There’s no risk of being charmed by him. We don’t see any tangible abuse either; it’s all deduction and grim clues — the earring on the floor, the stains on the sofa. The film pulls us tightly into the perspective of Julia Garner’s eponymous assistant, someone who is not able to be louche and charming and witty, because to do so would end her career. Instead she is carefully blank, expressing everything through her eyes in an extraordinary performance that would win endless awards if there were any justice in the world. The focus is on how it feels to be caught in that system, and the most electrifying scene is the one in which Garner’s character attempts to address her suspicions with an HR rep played by Matthew MacFadyen (Tom from Succession!).
This is the kind of film critics call “bleak but necessary”, which sounds about as fun as downing a cup of cold sick, but there’s real vision here, and a tension that almost — bear with me here — feels like a Saw movie, where you keep watching because there is something so horribly compelling about someone trying to escape an ingenious trap.
THE ASSISTANT (2020) Written by Kitty Green | Shot by Michael Latham | Edited by Kitty Green/Blair McLendon
