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Ruben Östlund’s Plattform Produktion has joined “Toxic,” the forthcoming satirical workplace drama from “Club Zero” director Jessica Hausner, which is among the projects being pitched during the Venice Gap-Financing
Market taking place Sept. 4 – 6.
The pan-European co-production is produced by Schubert (Austria), Essential Films (Germany), Société Parisienne de Production (France) and Plattform Produktion (Sweden). International sales will be repped by the Coproduction Office.
Told across four chapters, “Toxic” explores different aspects of the modern world of work. Through contemporary parables, it follows employees and employers within a capitalist system on the verge of outpacing itself. With a tone at times realistic, at others more absurd, it’s tied together by the human element that acts as the sand in the gears of a profit-driven world.
Working off a script co-written by Jessica Lind, Hausner said she was interested in exploring the many contradictions of capitalism, and the “mutual dependency” between workers and employers that’s fostering ever-growing economic gaps while leaving so many unfulfilled. “Is this system we work and live in the best system we can come up with?” she asked.
The question cuts to the very heart of a modern condition in which “our identities and the respect we command are often defined by our job and pay grade,” she said.
“Meaning in life is really created through the ideology of our society. As an individual, I don’t think one can find meaning all alone,” she said. “Meaning is created through others — through the eyes of my fellows in society. It is very much a question bound to the system we work in.”
Through its parallel storylines, the film explores how our understanding of self-realization in the workplace is evolving, contrasting exploitation and overwork with our desire to find meaning in our professional lives. Set within four different workplaces — an advertising agency; a waste disposal company; a nursing home; and an unprofitable retail chain — it examines how deeply people have internalized performance-driven pressures, and asks whether change is possible within a system rooted in profit and success.
Hausner’s last film, “Club Zero,” was set at a British boarding school where a nutrition teacher — played by Mia Wasikowska — pushed a gospel of mindful abstinence on her students, transforming them into a cult. In a glowing review out of Cannes, Variety’s Owen Gleiberman praised the “gripping and provocative” film as an “audaciously disturbing drama.”
Speaking to Variety from her home in Vienna, Hausner explained how “Toxic” is in conversation with her previous films.
“What is satisfying? What is it that really makes a life worth living? In my films, I always try to circle around these questions,” she said. “Not only on an individual level. I’m always interested in the societal level. Why am I made to think or to believe something? This is what I try to focus on in all my films. The way we are being manipulated, in a subtle, everyday-like way, by the society we live in.”
But what happens when society is in flux? Across Europe, the director noted, governments are mulling whether the continent’s work-life balance needs to be reconsidered. “The social system is becoming less affordable. This is an economic problem,” she said. “Many countries in Europe have to shift their social expenses from social care into building more weapons.”
Meanwhile, inequality is growing, and work itself, as Hausner put it, “no longer pays off, neither financially nor in terms of fulfilment.”
As “Toxic” illustrates, that leaves societies with many difficult questions and no easy answers — least of all from the tech barons and free-market evangelists who push capitalism as the miracle cure to all that ails us.
“If we knew a better solution, we would probably already be heading there,” said Hausner. “But it’s not at all obvious what the next step is.”
