I don’t like to think about movies this way because it’s such a relative term, but The Assistant is underseen. It’s hard to say that with a straight face, because right now it has 80,000 logs on Letterboxd. (You know what’s actually an underseen movie? Dzhamilya is an underseen movie.) But compared to the other Anglophone arthouse movies of 2020, The Assistant is dwarfed by really inferior work like The Father (283,000 logs), Nomadland (463,000), Promising Young Woman (568,000). Maybe when I’m finished with this project, it’ll be worth it to go back and see which movie, per Letterboxd, has the smallest reach of all the ones contributing quotes. Out of all the movies from the top ten, I know The Assistant is the least popular by a mile.

The Assistant allows us to draw the conclusions that Jane draws without having to work too hard. It’s a movie which is not literally about Harvey Weinstein, and you can figure out what’s happening even if you’ve never heard of Harvey Weinstein. There’s a major movie producer who appears to be engaging in some kind of illicit sex with an attractive young woman whose presence Jane can’t make sense of. Though she is only a minor figure at the office, a functionary with a first-in last-out job, she starts to worry to the point of taking traceable action. Eventually she contacts human resources and gets a sitdown with Wilcock, a genial guy who is engaged with what she has to say. Then the hammer falls.

The conversation starts to careen quickly for Jane, who was never in charge of it. She was swimming in the ocean and didn’t realize that the beach was a hazy yellow line in the distance. (Despite her affluent background, no one appears to have told her that HR doesn’t work for you.) What a condescending attitude, Wilcock tells her. Do you think this woman needs saving, like she needs someone else to make decisions for her? Do you think that we can’t find a replacement for you in this enormously competitive market, someone who had better grades than you from a better college than the one you went to? Eventually, she does what she’s advised to do; she rescinds her complaint.

Director Kitty Green, like we’ve established, doesn’t make it that hard for us to figure out what’s going on. Even the men watching this movie have to see what Jane sees. But just in case there was any doubt, Wilcock sends the last message like a guided missile aimed straight between Jane’s eyes. “You’re not his type,” he tells her as she’s in the doorway. It’s a chilling line for a transparent reason. Wilcock is all but admitting that the mogul has sex with who he wants when he wants to, and that he’s crumpled up Jane’s resistance like a soggy napkin. And the translucent reason is pretty cold as well. “You’re not his type” also means, “What, do you think we weren’t prepared for someone like you already? Do you think this is our first time?”