Corner Office

 The Authority Inc. company building looks like a sort of brutalist version of the tower of Orthanc; It doesn't rise as much as it looms, its furthest floors forever lost in a wintry mist. This is the sight that greets Orson (Stuart Hamm), the company's newest employee, as he gets off his car - black, like all the rest, in a sea of snow. Down drab, institutional hallways he goes, until he reaches his office - A seventies-style open-plan layout with the wrinkle that all the desks are arrayed surrounding their boss's crystal-walled room, in a clear nod to Bentham's panopticon.

 So far, so very Kafka. But here's another gentle twist to the formula: Orson is a willing, enthusiastic drone, a true believer in corporate drudgery. As he acclimates to his new role, it's not existential angst that gnaws at him, but the feeling that his talents are being ignored, and that he's being passed over in favour of his deeply mediocre colleagues.

 Orson's voiceover narration is constant, but it works in the movie's favour because: a) Hamm is a ridiculously charismatic actor and his delivery is on-point, and b) Ted Kupper's script is well-written and unorthodox enough to pack a lot of surprises and more than a few laughs, at least for a while. Our protagonist, we quickly discover, has a noxious cocktail of mental health issues - paranoia, social anxiety and dissociative episodes, not to mention an almost complete lack of empathy; A highly functioning sociopath, basically.

 His co-workers are not painted very sympathetically either. His neighbour Rakesh (Danny Pudi) is the best of the lot, but quickly earns Orson's contempt by... basically not being very tidy. The rest include a paranoid lifer (Bill Marchant), a caricature of a schoolyard goodie-two-shoes (Allison Riley), a vacuous bimbo (Kimberley Shoniker), and at the center of it all their genial but distant boss (the great Christopher Heyerdahl, doing his best Cushing-as-a-sweet-old-man impression).

 While wandering around the halls, Orson soon finds an abandoned office that suddenly swaps the rest of the movie's palette completely around: wood-panelled walls and exquisite furniture, a plush leather chair, muted lighting, tasteful paintings and a vinyl collection. He soon discovers that while working in that office he is deeply in the zone, producing documents that almost reduce his boss to joyful tears.

 His co-workers, though, do not appreciate his find; They insist that there is no room in that hall, that Orson just stands there like a statue when he claims to be in the room. As Orson sets a plan in motion to finally get the respect he feels he deserves, his colleagues band against him because, well, he's clearly fucking nuts.

 Corner Office is both deceptively simple and surprisingly complex mostly because it throws a lot of elements into what at its heart is a simple character study: How neurodivergent people are mistreated, sure, but that's complicated when the person being discriminated against is such a douchebag. The dispiriting crush and petty backstabbery of large corporate workplaces, set against someone who finds meaning in the rat race and said back-stabbing. The film is anchored to a deeply unreliable narrator, but it expertly charts a course that gives us a feel for what's actually going on even as it indulges in showing us Orson's delusions. None of the themes are especially novel, and the film doesn't pack any major surprises, but it's beautifully realised. Maybe it could stand to get twenty minutes or so trimmed off, but I didn't ever really feel it overstayed its welcome.

 The writing is sharp, Joachim Back's directing is assured, and the acting excellent. Stuart Hamm anchors the film and is, as always, on-point and very, very funny; It's a pleasure to watch him use his considerable charisma (which not even a conservative haircut, a beer belly and a dad 'stache can conceal) to fuel the most banal, deluded pronouncements.

 It's a hard movie to recommend in the sense that it's studiedly unspectacular, the sort of thing that only gets hurt by heightened expectations. Having said that, if you're not averse to a dry, idiosyncratic almost-cringe comedy, you can do a lot worse than this. I kind of loved it.