102 min | PG-13 | August 4, 2023 | Lionsgate
A corporate drone discovers a hidden office that makes him brilliant, productive, and serene. His coworkers insist the office does not exist. The premise promises a sharp little nightmare and then forgets to be one.
Orson works at a faceless company called the Authority, processing forms he does not understand for reasons no one explains. He is rigid, humorless, and convinced of his own superiority over every colleague. Then he finds a room that should not be there. Inside it he becomes a better worker and a calmer man, except his coworkers tell him the room is a blank wall and he is standing in it talking to himself. The film wants to be a deadpan parable about delusion, the comforts we invent to survive meaningless labor, and the office as a machine for erasing people. It states that idea early and then repeats it for the rest of its length.
Jon Hamm plays Orson with total commitment to the character’s airless self-regard. He delivers narration in a flat, satisfied monotone that treats petty grievances as cosmic injustices. Hamm finds real comedy in the way Orson misreads every social cue and congratulates himself for it. Danny Pudi plays Rakesh as the deskmate who watches Orson unravel with weary alarm, and he grounds the absurdity in something human. Sarah Gadon plays Alyssa, the receptionist Orson fixates on, with a careful blankness that the script never lets bloom. Christopher Heyerdahl plays the manager Andrew as bureaucratic menace in a cardigan.
Joachim Back directs from Ted Kupper’s screenplay, adapted from Jonas Karlsson’s novel “The Room.” Back shoots the office in cold institutional grays and sickly fluorescent light, and the production design strips every surface of personality. The hidden room is staged with warmer tones and softer framing to mark the divide between Orson’s fantasy and the gray reality. That visual joke is the film’s best idea and Back deploys it once and leaves it there. The editing holds on Hamm’s deadpan reactions long past the point where the gag has paid off.
The problem is structural. Kupper takes a single sharp premise and stretches it to feature length without finding a second movement. The Kafka comparison the film invites only exposes the gap, because Kafka builds dread through accumulation and this builds nothing. Orson begins as a delusional jerk and ends as a delusional jerk, and the journey between those points is a flat line. There is a tight, vicious short film inside this material about how work hollows a person out. This version mistakes restating its thesis for developing it.