Every day, millions of people turn on their TVs and watch a movie. And since laziness is totally a thing, they tend to watch movies on instant streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus, services which each have fewer movies than the average mom and pop video store that they put out of business, but that still have so many damned movies that the mind easily boggles from the sheer volume of options.
So before your eyes glaze over from scanning hundreds of titles you’ve never heard of and settle for watching old episodes of Doctor Who again, here is Now Streaming, a new weekly series from CraveOnline that highlights lesser known movies that are totally worth clicking, especially when you don’t even have to leave the house to watch them.
Case in point: Not Safe For Work, a micro-budget thriller directed by Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Avenger) that was barely released in in 2014, and now sits alongside better known but significantly crappier new releases like the RoboCop remake and The November Man on Netflix’s home page. Johnston’s film is the exactly the kind of low-budget suspense movie that plays very well while you’re sitting at home on your couch and eating Maruchan Instant Noodles, but which might have seemed like small potatoes if you had to get dressed and pay for parking in order to watch it.
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Max Minghella (The Mindy Project) stars as Tom Miller, a paralegal who gets fired from his promising position after he writes a well-intentioned memo that accidentally includes confidential information that could jeopardize the lives of multiple mob informants. No sooner does Tom shuffle outside with his pitiful cardboard box does he notice a mysteriously well-dressed man enter the law firm after hours, and no sooner does Tom decide to investigate does he discover that the never-named man, played by JJ Feild (Turn), plans to murder everyone left in the office and burn it to the ground.
What follows is a mostly clever, occasionally plot hole-suffering game of cat and mouse between Tom and the killer, who both manage to turn this otherwise boring, innocuous office building into a series of clever traps for one another using only cell phones, security cards and common workplace objects. Screenwriters Adam Mason and Simon Boyes appear to have spent at least a little time going out of their minds in crappy office jobs, and amused themselves by turning their pitiful cubicles and supply rooms into mental battlegrounds against deadly assailants. That “hard work” is all on the screen.
It’s too bad that their script suffers from a rather limp first act, in which the layout of the building is made abundantly clear and a small cast of future victims are introduced without much flare, and that there is at least one twist that’s obvious from a mile away, and which calls many of the events in Not Safe For Work into question. “If that guy was really that guy the whole time, why did he help that other guy?” A good question that never gets asked or answered, something which – again – might have been a real disappointment if watching Not Safe For Work required any more effort than clicking a button your remote.
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But when Not Safe For Work works it works just great, thanks to suspenseful direction by Joe Johnston, and a bizarre and creepy performance from JJ Feild as a genuinely disarming killer, who seems so uncomfortable with casual conversation that you understand why he went into such a solitary line of work, instead of finding himself a proper day job. The killer is a calculating maniac but also completely unable to maintain a real social interaction for more than 30 seconds without getting flustered and resorting to violence. One wonders how he manages drop off his dry-cleaning without dropping bodies at the mini-mall, and one definitely wonders how Tom is going to survive a battle against such a homicidal freak.
But those of us looking for an enjoyable thriller that exploits our workplace anxieties, or at least celebrates our ability to sneak around the cubicles without our boss noticing, will definitely find a safe bet with Not Safe For Work.
Not Safe For Work is now available on Netflix and for a rental fee at Amazon Instant. Availability is subject to change, so watch it while you can, and come back next week for a new underrated movie recommendation from CraveOnline’s Now Streaming!
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
