Buries most of its most salient points about women in the office world, the beginning of the end for the print industry and the cutthroat nature of business downsizing in a heap of Freudian psychology by-the-numbers. Not content to suffer the titular character with one or the other, the film chooses both an implication of sexual abuse from the father and an endless stream of repressive scolding from the mother. Some might argue that this is part of the film's existence as a maybe-parody of typical slasher films. Yet despite its moves into dark, and occasionally grotesque, humor, I don't really see this movie as a parody. It feels more like an embrace of genre types as a shorthand to suggest something frightening and inhuman about the corporate world. And when it hits these moments with gusto and strength unburdened by easy pop psychology explanations, it strikes an unexpected chord about the dismantlement of the American job market into the bare minimum of specialized occupations.
What Sherman does get right almost 100% of the time, as expected, is a suffocating visual aesthetic long before the movie veers into the grotesque. The office seems an inescapable labyrinth of tall walls and maze-like walkways. Despite my reservations about Carol Kane's mother as a character, the upstairs-downstairs dynamic is compellingly handled. As a somewhat new fan of Sherman's work, I was definitely excited to see this movie. While I didn't love it as much as the beginning made me think I would, I was not disappointed, either. I'm honestly surprised how much critics hated it. And sad that that hatred probably means Sherman won't make another movie.
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