Office Killer

Here's the thing about cult films--no one sets out to make one. Cult films gain cult status because they find that niche. But Cindy Sherman, the renowned photographer, seemed to have set out to make a cult film with Office Killer, released in 1997. The result is an off-key exercise in self-conscious directing that is highly unsatisfactory.

Sherman is one of the greatest photographers of her generation, known for the series Untitled Film Stills, so it would be only natural that she would make a film, and that it wouldn't be a generic one. Office Killer, like Mike Judge's Office Space that would come later, is an attempt to portray the soul-crushing atmosphere of office work, and also of the technology that helps squeeze that soul out of us (interestingly, of course, that technology is completely obsolete now--dot matrix printers and such).

The setting is a Consumer Reports-like magazine where workers are either being laid off or reduced to part-time and home-office workers. Carol Kane plays a mousy copy editor who has worked there for years. Jeanne Tripplehorn and Molly Ringwald also play workers there. Kane has been banished to working at home, where she cares for her crippled and mean mother (Alice Drummond). One night she is working late and she seeks the help of an obnoxious writer to fix her computer. She accidentally electrocutes him, which starts her on a killing spree.

Office Killer is expressionistic, and has little to do with reality. Kane sets up the corpses in her basement as if they were here friends, and she is given a backstory of being sexually abused by her father. I'm afraid none of this really works, and the film ends up a generic schlock-horror show.

Sherman's touches are interesting but off-putting: the lighting is all garish oranges and reds, dominated by fluorescent light. There's a grim humor to the proceedings (Kane kills the publisher by substituting butane in her asthma inhaler) but there's no wit to it.

Sherman never made another movie, which is too bad. If you've seen her photographs, she's sort of been making an epic American movie over the last thirty or so years. Office Killer seems like a blip along the way.