In director Kitty Green's quietly shattering drama 'The Assistant,' a young woman learns that her new boss is a serial sexual predator, but her efforts to call him out are met with indifference and hostility.
For a while, in Kitty Green's quietly shattering drama, we follow a young factotum named Jane through her dreary daily routines in a prominent New York film production company. The film appears to be shaping up as a procedural of the drudgery that faces college graduates today.
Arriving at the office before dawn, Jane, who's played by Julia Garner , makes coffee, opens packages and sneaks a look at the screenplays she's printing. Once the young male producers she serves trickle in she's kept busy booking and rebooking flights to Los Angeles, fetching lunch, watching over a child dumped on her by a woman who may or may not work there in an official capacity.
Amid coy hints or thundering silence from everyone around her, Jane tries to drum up support from her colleagues. Her timorous efforts to break the silence that shrouds her meet with indifference, ridicule, and, in one devastating set piece written with crisp minimalism by Green and tautly performed by British actor Matthew Macfadyen, Jane is treated to a punishing assault of gas-lighting and brutal bullying that threatens to disable her.
Without resort to a single scene of graphic sexual violence, Green nails down the awful truth that Jane's exploitation is part and parcel of a silent but systemic abuse of powerless and vulnerable women. Even her loving parents are too blinded by their pride in her getting her foot in the hallowed door to listen to her troubles.
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