88 min | R | January 31, 2020 | Bleecker Street
A young assistant arrives before dawn at a powerful film executive’s office and spends one ordinary day at her desk. She answers phones, copies scripts, and watches things she is not supposed to notice. The horror is that nothing happens, and everyone already knows.
Jane works as a junior assistant to a powerful film executive in New York. She arrives in the dark and leaves in the dark. Her days are made of small tasks. She prints schedules, orders lunch, books travel, and wipes a stain off the office couch. The film is not about her boss, who never appears on screen. It is about the system of small accommodations that lets him operate, and about how a single person learns the rules of complicity one quiet errand at a time.
Julia Garner plays Jane with a stillness that does most of the work. She keeps her face neutral while her eyes track everything. Garner shows the calculation in every interaction, the constant measuring of what she can say and to whom. The standout scene puts her across a desk from Matthew Macfadyen as Wilcock, the head of HR. Macfadyen plays him with warmth that curdles into menace, reassuring Jane while making clear that any complaint will cost her and protect no one. He smiles the whole time, and that is the threat.
Kitty Green writes and directs with a documentarian’s restraint. She built her career in documentary, and the discipline shows in every frame. The camera holds on Jane at her desk while phones ring offscreen and conversations happen at the edge of hearing. Green denies the audience the dramatic confrontations a conventional film would stage. The sound design carries the dread, with muffled voices behind closed doors and the constant low hum of office machines that never lets the tension release.
This is a film about labor and silence. Jane never witnesses a crime. She sees an earring on the floor, a young woman installed in a hotel, a phone call she should not have overheard. Green understands that abuse functions through paperwork and politeness, through the assistants who book the rooms and the executives who file the complaints away. The film refuses catharsis because catharsis would be a lie. It leaves Jane back at her desk, the day not yet over, the machine still running.