With shows like Severance leading the charge, workplace satire is taking a turn for the increasingly surreal as it deconstructs the white-collar American experience. Part of this wave is Joachim Black's dark comedy Corner Office, which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and is poised for a wide theatrical and video-on-demand release this August. Based on the novel The Room by Jonas Karlsson, Corner Office is a stylishly dour and turgid film that is never as biting or subversive as it seems to think it is.
Unassuming office worker Orson (Jon Hamm) begins working for a shadowy corporation known simply as The Authority, where he finds the daily office culture and many of his co-workers to be mind-numbingly dull. Unable to connect with any of his immediate colleagues, including his office neighbor Rakesh (Danny Pudi), Orson stumbles across a secret room in the office that contains reality-bending properties. With a whole new world of possibilities available to him, Orson tries to see how his unsanctioned access could benefit him at The Authority while trying to maintain the secret of its existence and his misuse of it.
Though Hamm has more than proven himself as a gifted comedic actor, with his memorable role in Good Omens as the most recent example, his performance here is among his strangest to date. That isn't to say that Hamm is ill-suited for the material, but in playing an awkward paper-pusher for a faceless corporation, his portrayal of Orson remains something of an enigma across the entire movie. There is the sense that a fair amount of this alienation and dissociation is deliberate, given the underlying themes of the story, but that separation runs the risk of impeding viewer investment in his character and the film overall.
Despite running for less than an hour and 45 minutes, Corner Office makes the audience feel every second of its runtime with its prolonged, quiet scenes as Orson keeps his head down through the daily tedium of his job. Corner Office is a workplace satire that makes its audience feel like they're going to work, with scenes carrying on far longer than they need to. By the time Corner Office gets around to making its commentary on the American workplace, viewers are likely too divested to care about the bigger questions the movie asks.
For a satire, Corner Office is neither particularly insightful nor funny in its execution. It's just one awkward vignette involving Orson to the next until the game is up for the hapless protagonist. The rest of the ensemble cast does a good enough job with their roles, with Sarah Gadon being a notable highlight, but not enough to elevate the material into something more captivating to watch. Simply put, Corner Office doesn't have enough compelling elements to weave into a story to fulfill its runtime as much as its cast tries.
Corner Office has all the makings of something poised to become a cult classic in a few years, with its retro-kitsch art design and cinematography, but ultimately, it is style over substance. Moving at a plodding pace, the movie unfolds as tediously for the audience as for the characters. With not enough juicy questions to ponder over, Corner Office leans into the surrealism of workplace satire without having anything particularly pertinent to say about the genre or lifestyle it skewers.
Directed by Joachim Black, Corner Office opens in theaters and is available on video on-demand platforms on Aug. 4.