The Assistant(2019) || The Anatomy of Everyday Misogyny, Laid Bare

Either yesterday or two days ago, I was talking with @netflixr in the comments of one of my film reviews about how cinematic disasters sometimes end up becoming legends. Funny enough, that same theory seems to apply to The Assistant and I don’t think I would’ve taken note of it if we didn’t have that conversation. So, I watched this film with a friend yesterday and immediately dismissed it as yet another Hollywood flop. But I decided to give it another chance, this time alone, just to be sure my first impression wasn’t off. So I rewatched it in the early hours of the morning, when my mind felt the calmest and everything around me was quieter.

As someone who studies systemic oppression, this film hits with the kind of precision that doesn’t need raised voices, dramatic music or explosive confrontation. It’s painfully quiet, but I realized in the course of my second watch that its quietness is the point. I mean that’s the exact frequency at which oppression becomes invisible to the people who benefit from it and unbearable to the people living under it.

(No Spoilers)

The film follows a single workday of Jane (Julia Garner), a junior assistant at a powerful New York production company. But really, it’s a film about how abuse operates structurally. It doesn’t deal with the big moments but the thousand tiny cuts that make a woman bleed long before anyone notices.

From the moment Jane enters the office, early, tired and already in cleanup mode, the film starts listing the ways oppressive systems reproduce themselves. This reproduction doesn’t happen through monsters hiding in shadows, but through men who shrug, women who tolerate, HR officers who gaslight and colleagues who participate simply by doing nothing.

What struck me most is how the film refuses to dramatize harassment. There’s no graphic assault scene or violent crescendo. Instead, it shows how violence can exist just in paperwork, phone calls, in body language and of course passively complicit silence. This the film makes evident in the coffee-making, dish-washing, booking of mysterious hotel rooms and wiping off a stain from the boss’s couch. Each task becomes part of an ecosystem built on women’s labor and silence.

There’s a truth people don’t like admitting and it’s that most oppressive systems don’t rely on villains; they rely on routine.

Watching Jane felt like watching someone drown quietly. Her performance is devastating because she barely speaks, yet you feel everything, the internalized tension, the self-surveillance, the fear of being difficult, dramatic, or ungrateful. It’s a portrait of what patriarchy does to women professionally, which teaches or rather forces them to shrink.

There’s a moment when Jane goes to HR to report her concerns. If you’ve ever studied institutional responses to harassment, you already know how this ends. The HR officer doesn’t just undermine her; he weaponizes reasonableness, professionalism, and empathy to gaslight her. He basically says, in corporate language:

“You’re overreacting. You’re the problem. Be careful.”

That’s basically a threat disguised as advice and women everywhere know that tone.

This film basically illustrates how abuse isn’t merely an individual act of cruelty but an entire machinery that protects the powerful and conditions everyone else into being accessories. This ranges from the male colleagues who ignore Jane’s discomfort to the female colleagues who warn her to keep her head down, the HR department that exists to protect the boss, not the workers and the industry culture where exploitation is normalized as ambition.

The film’s brilliance lies in showing how patriarchal systems survive even in progressive, creative spaces, places that claim to be modern but run on the oldest hierarchies.

The painful realism of this film is that it doesn’t give you the satisfaction you badly want. As a viewer, and as someone who has studied, seen and knows oppression, you keep waiting for Jane to snap, to confront, or maybe rebel, but the film doesn’t give you that because the reality is most women in her position can’t. And that refusal to give us catharsis is not a flaw. It’s basically the truth.

For those who may be interested, I’ll hold your hands and tell you that this film is not entertaining. Actually, it's not meant to be. It’s unsettling, slow and suffocating because workplace oppression is exactly that. It’s a film that demands the viewer pay attention to the micro-details that women juggle daily, the details men often dismiss as nothing.

And, for the kind of theme it tackles, it asks the hardest question. How many people does it take to uphold one man’s power?
The answer, the film shows, to my knowledge is, everyone who chooses not to disrupt the system.

Rating: 9/10

Not for people who need action, resolution or neatly packaged endings.