Pollen

This movie required the most suspension of disbelief of any movie I've ever seen. I don't know where to begin.

It's a "workplace horror" about a badly picked-on and bullied young woman, fresh out of college, apparently losing her mind and believing she's being pursued by some sort of tree-person that I couldn't be sure was supposed to be real or imaginary. The thing is, it's as over-the-top as any absurd comedy, but it's not a comedy, it's horror. Picture a workplace that's as much of an exaggerated caricature as "Office Space", but not a comedy. It's that weird and unbelievable. I don't know, maybe it was supposed to be a comedy-horror but they forgot to put the jokes in?

First she just seems badly bullied, so realistically it made the movie hard to watch, and even date raped by her asshole boss whom she's for some reason consented to go out with. But the abuse and intentional humiliation heaped on her by her coworkers soon grows so contrived and absurd that it stopped being tough to watch and just became silly. She repeatedly walks right into to being badly and publicly embarrassed by her coworkers in front of the entire office and then vitriolically blamed for it by her supervisors. Meanwhile, she for some reason obsesses over flowers given to her by the date rapist boss—who's the sort of two-dimensional movie sleaze who, after date-raping her, arrogantly leaves her a "present" of the morning-after pill on her desk and then immediately in the same conversation suggests she should pleasure him during lunch break, which, even coming the morning after he arrogantly forced his way into her house and bed, somehow still isn't enough to put her off from wanting to date him—and by the time the tree man showed up, any suspension of disbelief had already long since been immolated.

One higher-up is presented as so sympathetic to her in the midst of all this nastiness that you assume by the end of the movie he's going to do something worse to her than any of them of, and they edge right up to the line, with him appearing to be about to hit on her in the parking lot—moments after she's just been fired for, right in front of her supervisor, stabbing a co-worker in the thigh with a pen mocking her, no less—but it never happens, and that's the last week see of him, or of any reason why he was included in the story to begin with.

The strange thing is, in terms of production values, it's well-made. I just can't figure out what it was trying to be. Too absurd and comically exaggerated to work as horror, not funny enough (or at all) to work as comedy, and basically, one of the better-made movies I've ever seen that just landed with a resounding "clunk" and not much else.