by Michael Pattison

In Out of Office, Kialy Tihngang constructs a heightened, stylised capitalist workplace drama-cum-conspiracy thriller rooted in the artist’s own experiences as an office worker. Narratively, it charts the story of Office Girl (Laura Lovemore), a Black office staffer stuck in the basement drudgeries of VILCORP, an impossibly oppressive corporation operating from an insidiously hierarchical tower (seven storeys above ground, five under it), which is overseen by a cackling ghoul-like boss. Uncovering a sinister liquidation scheme, Office Girl escapes into the dreamily enticing clutches of People Food HQ, a workplace of ostensibly more promising character.

Encompassing green screen and digital effects alongside model sets and a lovingly lived-in design, Out of Office is the kind of film whose writer-director takes palpable delight in the way a word like ‘incessant’ can be enunciated, or in how the ‘thwock’ of a lid being removed from a perfume bottle might reverberate around the cold, cave-like setting of a workplace basement. Which is to say the fictional world here is at once unrecognisable and made, through the sheer force of its design, to bear an uncanny resemblance to the real-world dynamics of working for the man: its racisms, its sexisms, its openly exhibited broader cruelties.

Tihngang’s film is also, above everything else, a science fiction movie, in which the future looks nothing like the past but both are somehow credible avatars of the present. The artist allegorises this historical conundrum, where no two eras share the same internal relations or class structure, as a satirical critique of capitalism’s shapeshifting capacity, its mechanisms to absorb change in order to stay the same. While VILCORP looks like some abandoned set from The Crystal Maze (1990–2020) crossed with the partitioned workstations of Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), the suspiciously sunny and nebulously verdant vibes of People Food HQ recall the iconic wallpaper of Windows XP (and/or the subtly nightmarish mise-en-scène of Teletubbies (1997–2001).)

While both workplaces in Out of Office may stylistically differ, continuities in their immiserating effect are evident. The combination of workplace surveillance and worker isolation in the film’s first office setting gives way to subtler schemes in the second: here, Office Girl graduates from bottom feeder to family member, a strategic shift in top-down parlance that allows the decision-makers to incorporate brand management into the molecular basis of the wage labour that sustains them.

Tihngang’s depiction of People Food as a toxically high-functioning hub of image-obsessed white feminism is exaggerated only so that its truth values can be asserted. This is, metaphorically speaking, the era of false freedoms: the desk-bound Fordist modernity of VILCORP gives way – nay, birth – to the crushing disappointments of neoliberal enterprise, with its disingenuous diversity initiatives, vocational precarities and the prevailing assumption of worker buy-in. In the future, which is actually the present, you don’t just hate your job: you hate it while wearing its merch.