07/02/2025 - Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal deliver an artsy take on Robert Walser's 1908 novel, using anachronistic elements to keep the viewer reflecting on the protagonist's plight

l-r: Piotr Trojan, Agnieszka Żulewska and Andrzej Konopa in The Assistant

IFFR brings a second fine arts-inspired, world-premiering film to its Big Screen Competition (alongside Albert Oehlen’s Bad Painter [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Albert Oehlen
film profile]) with Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal’s The Assistant [+see also:
trailer
interview: Wilhelm Sasnal
film profile], co-directed by the married couple, a Polish painter-visual artist and editor-writer, respectively. The Sasnals’ film adapts Robert Walser’s 1908 novel of the same name into a winding tale of the protagonist’s time while in the employment of an irresponsible businessman and inventor. The source material’s literary sensibilities, which Wilhelm Sasnal adapts into the screenplay, can be heavily felt through the story’s commentary on class divides and bonds formed out of necessity.

Joseph Marti (Piotr Trojan) finds a job as a live-in assistant for a peculiar inventor, Tobler (Andrzej Konopa), who wants nothing more than to find investors for his creations, which include specialty clocks and tin openers. Knowing that he’ll be out of a job, and a home, if Tobler fails, Marti stays on for the position and the good food, watching each failed business venture pass them by. Marti also develops a complex relationship with Tobler’s wife (Agnieszka Żulewska), whom he feels sorry for under Tobler’s harsh reign, even though he is simultaneously disgusted by her privilege. As Tobler refuses to pay his past employees and lashes out at his wife and Marti, our central character begins to realise the complexity of the household environment. The relationships grow icier as he is expected to carry out stranger tasks, becoming more of a live-in butler than an assistant.

Wilhelm Sasnal also takes on the cinematography for the work, which innately has a very period-drama, artsy sort of feel to its grainy texture and wandering camera, complemented by rigorous production design of the era by Ewelina Gąsior. As DoP, Wilhelm Sasnal also uses a very deliberate small set of zooms, which shakes the viewer out of any reverie into which they might be sinking. However, as we spend almost no time with Marti’s interiority, it becomes difficult to connect with him in a meaningful way and hard to understand why he feels such a specific devotion to his new employer.

The film’s most thought-provoking element is how the directors take the story out of the past by adding a number of anachronistic musical elements and scenes that suggest that Marti’s story is better read as an allegorical tale. Replete with electronic synthesiser tunes and, later, electric guitar and alternative-rock tunes, the score makes us think beyond the story's social environment. In one moment that stretches beyond the film’s realm of reality, he even tries to convince Tobler’s wife that the tin opener will be successful, saying that it will be produced and used en masse in two great world wars beginning in 1914 and 1939. However, the two-hour running time of The Assistant could easily have been pared back, perhaps to even greater effect, with the more non-realistic scenes taking centre stage in a tale that demands both a grounded story and powerful reflexivity.

The Assistant is a Polish-UK production by LunaFilm and contemporary art gallery Sadie Coles HQ. Lights On is entrusted with its world sales.