TheMovieVampire’s review published on Letterboxd:
The Assistant may well be the first scripted movie to have been made directly in response to the wave of #MeToo accusations that swept across Hollywood in late 2017 after Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment was revealed through reporting. That is in part a function of this being a very small scale movie that could be shot very quickly; in fact much of it is set in a single location: a really unpleasant looking East Coast office of some sort of Hollywood production company. The environment is a far cry from the kind of stylized movie industry we see in shows like “Entourage” or even in critical films like The Player and looks at the business side of the industry at the lowest and least glamorous level. The title character is a woman played by Julia Garner who starts to notice little red flags that lead her to believe that her boss is a sexual predator using the casting couch but she isn’t really finding what would be considered a smoking gun. We never really see this boss and for that matter we don’t get much of the perspective of his direct victims either, instead this is a movie about how “open secrets” can exist in work places and what it’s like to know about these things without being able to prove anything and how the sort of conspiracies of silence kind of quietly occur. All of that is admirable and I respect what the movie is doing, but whether or not I actually “enjoyed” watching it is kind of another matter. Sometimes when you set out to make your movie cold and drab you succeed and there’s a level of minimalism here that, while effective, does not exactly make the movie engaging at times. Still, for what it’s trying to do the movie is pretty strong.