Follows one day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner), a recent college graduate and aspiring film producer, who has recently landed her dream job as a junior assistant to a powerful entertainment mogul. Her day is much like any other assistant's - making coffee, changing the paper in the copy machine, ordering lunch, arranging travel, taking phone messages, onboarding a new hire. But as Jane follows her daily routine, she, and we, grow increasingly aware of the abuse that insid... (Full plot summary below)
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Follows one day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner), a recent college graduate and aspiring film producer, who has recently landed her dream job as a junior assistant to a powerful entertainment mogul. Her day is much like any other assistant's - making coffee, changing the paper in the copy machine, ordering lunch, arranging travel, taking phone messages, onboarding a new hire. But as Jane follows her daily routine, she, and we, grow increasingly aware of the abuse that insidiously colors every aspect of her work day, an accumulation of degradations against which Jane decides to take a stand, only to discover the true depth of the system into which she has entered.
Leave your thoughts about The Assistant.
| Time OutTomris LafflyThe understated film builds into a gut punch that’s more painful than anything in the superficial, recent Roger Ailes exposé "Bombshell." |
| VoxAlissa WilkinsonIt’s one of the best, most gripping, and smartest films of 2020. |
| RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyThe Assistant, a very good film, is especially good on power dynamics. |
| New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreWhat makes the film such a spare but searingly insightful treatment of the issues at the core of Me Too is the way it refuses to separate its unseen executive’s sexual predation from the larger structures that enable it. |
| LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenGarner gives a remarkable performance, especially considering she has very little dialogue with which to work. |
| The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldYou leave The Assistant thinking about why some of us are invisible and some of us don’t notice — and about how evil lives in the places from which we look away. |
| Boston GlobeTy BurrThe Assistant is a stealth bomb of a movie: It barely makes a noise but it leaves a crater in your heart. |
| The AtlanticDavid SimsGreen has crafted a hermetic, office-bound world so ambiguous that the moments when she reveals its dynamics directly sometimes come off as disconcerting. |
| PolygonKaren HanGreen’s approach to stories — finding larger truths rather than focusing on the most sensational aspects — vaults The Assistant into extraordinary territory, as it sheds light not only on the actions of abusers in power, but on the people around them, who can’t or won’t do anything to change the status quo. |
| Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsBesides being the best American film of our new year, writer-director Kitty Green’s drama The Assistant confounds expectations and has the strange effect (on me, anyway) of simultaneously chilling and boiling the viewer’s blood. |
