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The Assistant

Harvey Weinstein – the film mogul now serving a 23-year sentence for sexual assault and rape – is never identified by name in Kitty Green’s brilliantly observed and deeply disturbing new drama, but his unseen presence pervades every dark and grubby corner.

Drawing on her experience as a documentary-maker, Green adopts a deliberately low-key approach to follow a single miserable day in the life of

Jane (Julia Garner, right) a young woman still coming to terms with her new job as a lowly assistant at a New York film company. She’s been there for only a few weeks but already her dream is turning into a nightmare.

She’s the lowest of the low, arriving before dawn, switching on the lights, turning on the coffee machines, printing the first documents for the day. But those are only her official duties – her ghastly unofficial ones include wiping unidentified stains from her boss’s office couch, reuniting damaged jewellery with its horrified female owner and stashing his impotence treatments.

Garner is nomination-grabbingly good in a film that stands comparisons with last year’s Bombshell (see Films, p60), not only exposing the central hypocrisy – everyone knows what’s going on, nobody says anything – that allowed abusers like Weinstein to survive for so long but also doing a wince-makingly good job of recreating the daily horrors of working in a toxic office environment. Available to buy on most platforms Matthew Bond