Critic's Notebook

Christine Tamalet/Gaumont France 3 Cinema

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Stéphane Brizé’s “A Good Little Soldier” exposes a dirty little secret of the corporate world that, until now, seems to have been explored most seriously not by journalists or filmmakers but by TikTok: all that corporate speak about branding, philosophy, core values, company culture, and inclusion is, for the most part, bullshit. These bromides are the brainchildren of human-resources and communications departments, carefully worded to make an organization sound humane, progressive, and vaguely utopian. The people at the top may sign off on the slogans, but few within the organization actually take them to heart, much less allow them to govern their behavior.

I, like I’m sure countless others, was once naïve enough to expect an employer to live up to the slogans preinstalled on the wallpaper of every company-issued computer — to believe that if an organization loudly proclaimed its values, it might actually have some. Mr. Brizé’s mordant new film suggests that such faith is not merely misplaced but potentially dangerous. “A Good Little Soldier” understands that the most poisonous workplace is not necessarily the one that openly declares itself ruthless. It is the one that tells you, repeatedly and convincingly, that it cares.

The film begins amid the hustle and bustle of skyscrapers, escalators, and metro trains, all propelled by a frantic percussion-only score that makes the modern workplace sound less like a place of employment than a machine that has been left running unattended. Carla Moretti (Alba Rohrwacher, Alice’s sister), a newly minted human-resources manager at the Amali insurance company, presents a corporate video designed to attract top new graduates. It celebrates the company’s supposedly inclusive culture, where disabled employees are not merely accommodated but encouraged to thrive.

Most of the people around the conference table respond positively to the video – except for the one person whose opinion actually matters: chief executive Arnaud (Vincent Lindon). Without the slightest diplomatic filter, he declares that highlighting disabled employees makes people uncomfortable and that political correctness is a form of oppression. Just a guess, but he probably voted for Marine Le Pen.

Arnaud’s feedback sends Carla into a tailspin. She is new enough to the job to believe that she might be able to make a difference, but also insecure enough to understand that her position is entirely dependent on the whims of someone who can erase her work with a sentence. While scrambling to revise the video, Carla is made aware that Ms. Lalouette (Carine Rouvier) has been verbally abusing her subordinate Ms. Morel (Sandra Le Gall). At first, Carla does what a conscientious H.R. professional is trained to do: she listens, assesses, documents, and tries to keep the situation from escalating into a catastrophe for everyone involved.

But then she is given a recording of a private conversation between the two women, and the matter becomes impossible to dismiss. Carla tries to intervene without getting anyone fired, hoping to resolve the conflict while protecting both employees. Her noble intentions, naturally, backfire. In the corporate world Mr. Brizé depicts, doing the right thing is less a path to redemption than an invitation to become the person blamed for everything that follows.

That predicament extends into Carla’s private life. She shares joint custody of her son, Louis (Adrien Bobinet), with Olivier (David Talbot), but her workload becomes so overwhelming that she skips a week of parental duties. She eats at her desk. She works late. She parents via Zoom. Louis’s poor math grades become yet another source of anxiety. The irony is painful: Carla is neglecting the people she loves because she genuinely cares about doing her job well, even as the institution for which she is sacrificing her family life regards her as utterly disposable.

This is where “A Good Little Soldier” becomes more than another indictment of corporate hypocrisy. Carla is not a cynic who has figured out how to game the system. She is a believer. She thinks work should mean something. She believes that rules exist for a reason, that employees deserve to be treated fairly, that an organization’s stated values ought to have some relationship to its actual behavior. Her tragedy is that she keeps discovering that these assumptions are liabilities.

When she tries to do right, she gets herself into trouble. When she succeeds, someone else takes the credit. When she protects the company, the company does not necessarily protect her. The better she performs as a conscientious employee, the more thoroughly she becomes trapped by the machinery she is trying to operate humanely.

It is all so very fucked — which is precisely why it feels so very familiar to so many.

The screenplay by Mr. Brizé, Coralie Ameedéo, and Olivier Gorce captures contemporary corporate culture with unnerving precision. There is scarcely a false note in the film’s depiction of the endless meetings, euphemistic language, institutional procedures, performative concern, and carefully calibrated power dynamics. The dedication, the personal cost, and the eventual corporate betrayal are rendered in a register that is neither melodramatic nor particularly forgiving. The film understands that workplace cruelty rarely arrives in the form of a villain twirling his mustache. More often, it comes as an email, a policy directive, a meeting invitation, a revised PowerPoint, or a cheerful request to “circle back.”

Mr. Brizé has made a number of films about labor and the indignities of working life, including “The Measure of a Man” and “Another World,” but “A Good Little Soldier” may be his most incisive workplace drama because its battlefield is not the factory floor but the supposedly enlightened white-collar office. The film is less interested in the spectacular abuses of capitalism than in the small humiliations that people learn to accept in exchange for a salary, a title, or the promise of professional advancement. Its horror lies in the realization that the system does not need everyone to be cruel. It merely needs enough people to be afraid.

There is even some sitcom-esque levity amid the bleakness, particularly in the seemingly absurd mental-health sessions in which the institutional mechanisms designed to resolve the conflict impress as doing almost exactly the opposite. Ms. Lalouette manages to present herself as a cooperative team player, while Ms. Morel emerges looking like the villain. The joke, of course, is that the system is evaluating their performances rather than confronting what actually happened. Even therapy becomes another corporate theater in which the employee who plays the part most convincingly wins.

Though “A Good Little Soldier” is unmistakably French, the malaise it depicts is universal. The names of the companies may change, as do the slogans plastered across their walls, but the fundamental bargain remains recognizable: give us your time, your energy, your loyalty, and increasingly your identity, and we will tell you that we are a family — right up until it becomes inconvenient to actually treat you like family.

Mr. Brizé’s achievement is to make that familiar betrayal feel newly alarming. “A Good Little Soldier” is not a film about one exceptionally bad boss or one dysfunctional company. It is about what happens when institutions discover that values are easier to advertise than to practice. And it is a film that anyone who has ever eaten lunch at their desk, answered an email while on vacation, apologized for being overwhelmed, or sacrificed huge chunks of their personal life for a job will recognize with uncomfortable immediacy.

A U.S. distributor needs to pick it up. “A Good Little Soldier” needs to be seen — not because it tells us anything we don’t already know about the workplace, but because it gives a name, a face, and finally a very human cost to the things we have been conditioned to dismiss as simply the way work works.