Critics reviews

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.

Kitty Green is a director of proximity. She offers no respite to the film’s intense, humming tension. Instead of wielding it into an action or reaction, her film is made taut throughout, like ice that doesn’t evaporate in the sun.

It’s a tough movie, and on its own determinedly modest, claustrophobic terms, an extraordinary one: It gleams with a blinding bleakness that makes it one of the best American films released this year.

This compact, almost Bressonian narrative feature by Kitty Green, an Australian non-fiction filmmaker now in Brooklyn, has a dark, tense force it keeps in place through minimal dialogue in limited settings.

Kitty Green’s The Assistant is a claustrophobic, intimately unsettling movie about the assistant to an arrogant and abusive New York based film mogul.

Green maintains strict control over how she tells the story, and it's really something to behold. By imposing limits—through the narrow point of view, through never succumbing to the impulse to explain or underline or even show—Green reveals herself to be a narrative filmmaker of considerable power.

It’s essential to discuss, and to determine, what “The Assistant,” Kitty Green’s emotionally devastating, conceptually powerful new movie, is about. The constraint of thought to exactly and only what’s seen, and the way a character is manipulated to disbelieve what she perceives, are the very premises of the action.

More than a few viewers will find it a grim, even taxing watch; but Garner is so wonderfully cast that she makes the slow draining of Jane’s soul almost visible.

Given the ongoing flood of testimonies to the media and in court, it's still way too early to call this terrific little drama a period piece.

Green’s film is an interesting test case for the kind of cinematic approaches possible for the #MeToo movement, a subject that risks inviting sensationalism and voyeurism. With her measured, unrelenting realism and focus on systems of complicity rather than the crimes themselves, Green avoids those pitfalls, but her approach leaves no room for displays of courage, let alone hope or change.

All of this—every moment in the movie—rides on Garner’s shoulders, and she delivers something more complex than any words you might use to describe it.