Throughout the day, a variety of people from the boss's life interact with Jane, including his wife, his children's nanny, a famous actor, and a group of Chinese film producers.

Wilcock, the head of HR, encourages Jane to share her concerns, but later makes clear that he is turning a blind eye to her harassment claims, before demeaning her, speaking down to her, and calling her jealous.

In September 2018, it was announced Kitty Green would write and direct the film with James Schamus and Scott Macaulay producing under their Symbolic Exchange banner.

The experience nearly led her to leave filmmaking, but she instead decided to "explore the underlying sexism she was exposed to, a subject that initially took the form of sexual misconduct on college campuses but pivoted when the Weinstein story broke.

[6] Her interviews included former assistants at film studios, agencies, and production companies, some of whom had worked at the Weinstein Co.[6] Green "picked up on patterns of women feeling disempowered, threatened or ignored, incorporating them into the screenplay.

[7] Green cast Garner after seeing her on the TV series The Americans and needing someone "striking" to contrast with the mundanity of the office tasks in the film.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Led by a powerhouse performance from Julia Garner, The Assistant offers a withering critique of workplace harassment and systemic oppression.

[14] Writing for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called The Assistant "a claustrophobic, intimately unsettling movie" and wrote, "it can claim to be the first drama that addresses the #MeToo issue".

[15] In a similarly positive review, Moira Macdonald of the Seattle Times lauded Julia Garner's performance and said the film shone "a light on a malevolent shadow".

[16] Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times called the film "less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment", and wrote that Garner's performance "makes the slow draining of Jane's soul almost visible".

[17] Justin Chang of NPR concluded that "it's the rigorous understatement of The Assistant that makes it so powerful in its vision of how easily the Harvey Weinsteins of the world could exploit their absolute authority for years with little fear of consequence.