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Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal’s reimagining of The Assistant (Der Gehülfe) is a fin-de-siècle period piece interwoven with echoes of 1970s surrealist cinema. Journeying alongside protagonist Joseph Marti, the hired assistant of mercurial inventor Carl Tobler, the film traces a process of seduction and gradual entrapment, in which a man is tamed and bound to a place and its people until his sense of freedom erodes. Drawing on Robert Walser’s novel in which the protagonist serves as an alter ego of the author himself, the film foregrounds the enduring mechanism of labour-induced humiliation as a social norm, rendering Marti a contemporary figure whose experience echoes the realities of our own.