Office Killer Review (Film, 1997) The Archives
Office Killer is one weird horror film. The individual elements aren’t so strange. It’s an office horror where a neglected member of the staff begins killing her enemies and covering for their absence with impeccable detail. The whole thing is just really off-kilter.
Carole Kane stars as Dorine, a mousy member of the copy team at a general interest magazine. She’s the longest-standing employee in the office and one of the first to have her hours cut to part-time due to budget shortfalls. Kane’s performance is totally believable, making the character all the more disturbing.
She’s quiet. She struggles to maintain eye contact with anyone. She’s exceptionally intelligent and skilled at copy-editing. She will get the job done no matter what, even if that job quickly shifts to covering up her string of murders for any minor transgression.
The rest of the office in Office Killer is rotting from the inside out. Everyone is fighting for survival during the layoffs. Even the editorial board is more cutthroat than ever before. As the office staff starts to disappear one by one, long-buried tensions rise to the surface and spill over in unexpected ways.
I have to assume that Office Killer is intended to be a horror/comedy film. The comedy, though, is so weird and unsettling that it creates an alternate universe. Director Cindy Sherman crafts such a cold, unnatural tone that nothing can be taken for granted or assumed to be real.
Essentially, we’re pulled from a real source of tension–a company downsizing its workforce–into the paranoid delusions of Dorine. Everyone loses their grip on reality because of the tension at work and Dorine’s backstory, slowly revealed throughout the film, leaves her poised to drop the fastest.
Everything about Dorine makes you want to feel bad for her. The other employees use her. She’s stuck at home caring for her abusive mother. She’s shown to be excellent at her job, yet she’s the first person we see react to losing hours at her job. She’s too willing to help other people and take all the blame when things go wrong.
Yet throughout Office Killer, we know Dorine really is a bad person. She’s manipulative. She’s calculating. She’s capable of confronting death without anything resembling a normal human reaction. Her life is her work, so she eventually chooses to take control of work to create her ideal life. The result is just one of the singular strangest narrative horror films you’ll ever encounter.
Sadly, Office Killer is not on any streaming services or readily available to purchase. You can rent it with Netflix’s DVD service or find out of print copies of the DVD for ridiculous prices on Amazon.
