Spoilers are not cleaning that up.

Imagine a circus clown from two centuries ago. He takes out a banana and shows it to the audience. Using very grand gestures, he peels the banana, eats it and discards the peel carelessly. Then he shakes his hands and proceeds to walk over the peel falling down. Are you laughing yet? That’s how I felt watching this comedy film. Was it a cultural thing? Let’s hope so. Grab the mop and follow me.

EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH (2021) was directed by Véronique Jadin. Inès (Jasmina Douieb) is the only working employee and one of scarce females in an company that sells cleaning supplies. She’s skipped over every promotion, salary raise and left behind to care for the office when everyone goes out for lunch. Her male colleagues are completely incompetent and misogynistic to the point of unbearable ridicule. When intern Mélody joins the company, there’s zero effort from anybody else in training her but Inès. The two women form a necessary bond, that soon will turn into complicity when bodies start dropping left and right.

I think there’s still a place for slapstick comedy, but with this sloppy timing I couldn’t really find any humour. Each time we see someone bite it, we have to go through the process of setting up everything just so that we see it coming a mile away and we are shown the demise beyond the punchline. I felt like everything was being explained to me before, during and after just in case I didn’t get it. The problem might have something to do with editing and or cultural timing but I just felt every joke/death was slowed down so much that it becomes tedious instead of funny. There’s some scenes that felt too awkward to take in.

Not recommended unless you are ok with overdrawn slapstick comedy. Supposedly there is horror in the film but I couldn’t find it. The jokes are so patronizing that it felt like the movie was mansplaining humour to the audience. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing that I don’t get, in which case I would recommend reading another review because I couldn’t find anything to like here. Not worth a watch from my point of view.

That will do for now.