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Office Killer
D: Cindy Sherman (1997); with Carol Kane, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Molly Ringwald, Eric Bogosian. Now more than ever, the office environment has been portrayed as a fate far worse than suburbia. Thanks to the popularity of the
Dilbert comic strip and the subtle genius of Mike Judge's
Office Space, cubicle dwellers are starting to come to terms with their nine-to-five destinies.
Office Killer, however, doesn't focus on the buffoonish policies or hourly entrapment that frustrate so many corporate drones. Instead, it centers on the grating characters that occupy such settings and what happens when the office punching bag finally loses it. The punching bag is Dorine (Kane), a copy editor at
Constant Consumer magazine. She's surrounded by incompetence, arrogance, and abuse. The office faves, Norah (Tripplehorn) and Kim (Ringwald), are two-faced louts, who put on their best smiles in front of the bosses then rip them to shreds at happy hour. But as mistreated as Dorine is, she's a dedicated copy editor, whose days are devoted to her job and evenings are spent with her crippled mother. When she is faced with the threat of downsizing, something finally snaps. While working late one night, she accidentally electrocutes a pompous feature writer and gets a bizarre idea. She'll manage her own staff ... of corpses. First, she'll take over all of her victim's responsibilities and save the day on various projects. So, as she rises the corporate ladder at work, she continues to add to her collection of rotting co-workers. Director Sherman (a photographer by trade) offers stylish shots and sometimes capitalizes on the dreary office setting. Equally potent are her creepy flashbacks to Dorine's dysfunctional past. Plot-wise, things get a little bland, and the film drags a bit. Kane's portrayal is convincing enough, but there's not much room for her to move beyond her mousy, maniac character. It's a shame, because
Office Killer begins as a truly clever effort and then turns into an exercise of shallow darkness. Perhaps Sherman should have concentrated on the realistic terror of staff meetings, "casual day," and the office lunch room. Instead, we get frequent images that are typical of most horror movies and not really worth revisiting.
