Cindy Sherman’s “Office Killer” Turns Her Cinematic Masquerades Into Slasher-Mode Abjection
For decades, American artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) has used the camera to test how femininity is staged, consumed, and policed. Her photographs often feel like stills from movies that never existed, thick with implication and withheld violence. In “Office Killer,” the only feature film she has made, that implication is no longer subtext. It becomes the movie’s operating system.
The film’s cast includes Jeanne Tripplehorn, Barbara Sukowa, and Michael Imperioli, with Molly Ringwald appearing as a sharp-edged coworker who ultimately occupies the familiar role of the “final girl.” Yet “Office Killer” is notably uninterested in the usual mechanics of suspense. Characters are dispatched one after another with an almost procedural calm, and the question of who makes it out alive registers as secondary to what the film is determined to show.
What it shows is a catalog of graphic horror imagery: lopped-off hands, bodiless heads, bleeding torsos, and a series of deaths that escalate in grotesquerie, including death by butane and attempted strangulation. The effects are deliberately artificial, leaning into camp prosthetics rather than realism, as if Sherman were insisting that the viewer keep one eye on the construction of the spectacle even while recoiling from it.
A more disturbing current runs beneath the workplace carnage. Dorine’s father — portrayed by Eric Bogosian — anchors an incestuous subplot that surfaces in a childhood flashback, where a gesture of touch becomes unmistakably predatory. The sequence shifts the film’s unease from the sensational to the intimate, suggesting that the most corrosive horror is not the body’s destruction but the family’s violation of boundaries.
“Office Killer” arrived at the tail end of a 1990s moment when abject art was a dominant language across galleries and museums. Theorist Julia Kristeva famously described the abject as that which “disturbs identity, system, order” and refuses stable borders. In the decade’s art, that refusal took many forms: Paul McCarthy’s videos and sculptures that waded into bodily fluids and degradation, or Pope.L’s performances that subjected his own body to punishing conditions to expose social exclusion.
Sherman’s contribution to that landscape is distinct. Rather than treating abjection as a generalized assault on decorum, she ties it to the gendered scripts of film and the ways women are framed, threatened, and made legible through violence. The movie reads as an extension of her long engagement with cinematic archetypes, but with the safety of the still image removed. Here, the camera doesn’t merely allude to danger; it follows through.
The film’s final scene makes the connection explicit. Dorine flees town wearing a blonde wig and a noirish outfit that recalls the wardrobe Sherman donned in her “Untitled Film Stills.” As the camera moves around the roof of Dorine’s car, it reveals a grim passenger: the decapitated head of her office manager, tucked into a duffel bag on the front seat. In the rearview mirror, Dorine catches her own gaze — a moment that briefly collapses character and creator, as if Sherman’s decades of self-invention have driven straight into the horror she once kept at a distance.
In that closing image, “Office Killer” clarifies what has always haunted Sherman’s work: the thin membrane between performance and threat, between the roles women are asked to play and the violence that shadows those roles. The film may be drenched in gore, but its most lasting effect is conceptual — a reminder that the scariest part of a genre can be the social script it refuses to let us ignore.
