Don’t Miss This Must-See Performance From Fantastic Four and Weapons Star Julia Garner
It’s Julia Garner’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Fully free from the busy schedules of her TV shows Ozark and the miniseries Inventing Anna, Garner’s finally had some room in her schedule in the last two years to start headlining movies again. That’s led to her headlining two of the most anticipated movies of summer 2025: In The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Garner played Shalla-Bal/The Silver Surfer, while she took on the lead role in Zach Cregger’s (Barbarian) new horror movie Weapons, as beleaguered teacher Justine Gandy.
Across these films, and especially with the excellent Weapons, Garner’s secured widespread acclaim, continuing the streak of critical praise she received for Ozark and Inventing Anna. However, the DNA of her greatest film performances was established at the dawn of the decade, in a 2020 masterpiece known as The Assistant.
What Is Kitty Green’s The Assistant?
Writer/director Kitty Green didn’t intend to make The Assistant a searingly relevant critique of toxic film industry norms. Initially, her storytelling gaze about a woman navigating constant misogyny and sexual harassment would’ve been set on a college campus. All the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, though, inspired her to change course. Now the feature would explore a woman employee working under an unseen Weinstein stand-in. The origin story heartbreakingly reflects how misogynistic norms and abusive behavior are normalized in so many workspaces. From college campuses to movie studios, these horrors chillingly persist.
This harrowing backdrop is where Julia Garner’s Jane, The Assistant’s protagonist, comes in. Green’s script follows solely one day in Jane’s existence as she continues her junior assistant job at a film company. While she tries putting on a muted, agreeable exterior, this job is taking an immense toll on her psyche. Throughout The Assistant, audiences only see the aftermath of the horrors Jane’s boss perpetuates. It’s a striking way of putting us into this woman’s mindset. Like us, Jane doesn’t witness the unthinkable firsthand, but knows it’s going on behind a closed door just over her shoulder.
Garner is magnificent, portraying Jane’s troubled persona within Green and cinematographer Michael Latham’s subdued visual scheme. This is not a feature full of grand monologues or sweeping examples of toxic workplace behavior. This is a horrifying observation of how misogyny and dehumanizing workspaces are subtly reinforced and maintained. Within that subtlety-driven approach, Garner thrives. She just has to sit there with a forlorn expression, and she can communicate so much tangible torment. It’s all bottled up, but Garner makes those repressed emotions so palpable.
The Assistant Shaped Garner’s Big Movie Roles
In The Assistant, Julia Garner displays a gift for making so much out of restrained acting. In her big sequence with HR department head Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen), for instance, Garner rips one’s heart out quietly, portraying Jane realizing the resources meant to “help” employees don’t really exist. A later sequence where male co-workers hover over Jane and suggest what she should type into an “apology” letter to her abuser boss sees the performer thriving under similarly subdued circumstances. Even around her intentionally noiser male co-stars, Garner’s hollow reciting of certain phrases in the letter and rigidly unvarying physicality devastatingly suggest a person nursing a shattered spirit.
Wringing so much out of purposefully stripped-down material is a gift Garner would later exploit in her significantly costlier summer 2025 tentpoles. In The Fantastic Four: First Steps, for instance, Shalla-Bal isn’t a chatty extra-terrestrial. Her grand declarations of things like “I herald your end” radiate lots of prowess in just a few words. Even more relevantly, Weapons has a fantastic sequence where Garner’s Justine Gandy waits in her car at night until just the right moment when she can safely make it to her front door. It’s a heartwrenching dialogue-free display of vulnerability that Garner mastered on The Assistant.
The precise physicality throughout her Weapons performance, meanwhile, evokes how Garner honed her skills in getting maximum power out of even just a person’s gait in The Assistant. It’s fascinating to see how these major studio titles provide echoes of one of the first indie gems of the 2020s. However, even if these summer 2025 genre features didn’t exist, Garner’s outstanding performance in The Assistant would be well worth praising. It’s a captivating anchor to a gripping (albeit quietly crushing) drama that desperately needs to be on more people’s radar, especially since we’re all now living in Julia Garner’s world.
The Assistant is now streaming on Hulu.
