If you are looking for explosions, capes, or fingernail-gnawing intensity, neither The Assistant nor A Hidden Life* are for you. Instead of action, you get detailed compositions; instead of snappy dialogue, you get characters at the moral crossroads. While different in topic, scope, and the particular Beelzebub’s lurking unseen, the two films share a deliberate pace and an agonizing grind. One finishes with liberation and death, and the other corruption and survival.

The Assistant, written and directed by Kitty Green, studies a single workday for Jane (Julia Garner). She toils for an unnamed Boss who, we learn quickly, is the life-giving sun in this unidentified entertainment universe.** Rotating around him are planets of various sizes–executives, producers, writers, and actors–who find their meanings, purposes, and paths in relation to him. Jane is not a planet, or even a moon, but likely a comet, burning bright, just on the edge of oblivion, and only sometimes noticed. She is a recent college graduate, marked at first by her steadfastness.

Jane is the first to arrive at the office. She turns on the lights, makes the coffee, copies any relevant documents, procures food, and tidies up, as much a maid as an executive assistant. Jane eats her meals standing over the break room sink, or hunched over her keyboard as she powers through email correspondence. She wears a constant expression, a mixture of gratitude and terror. Anyone who has ever been the new guy or girl in a work environment has worn the same face.

Jane’s Boss never appears on camera, but we hear him through phone calls or in the background of a meeting. Jane runs afoul of him when she mishandles a conflict between the Boss and his wife. Her actions and words are guided by good motivations. She wants to resolve issues and help the wife, who seems frantic; Jane’s loyalty to the Boss is challenged. He barks profanities and Jane sends an obsequious email that takes full responsibility for her “misdeeds.”

The precise nature of the dispute spills throughout the day. The Boss has an insatiable appetite for young women. Jane finds the detritus of sexual encounters and pieces begin to come together. This crystallizes with Sienna’s (Kristine Forseth) arrival in the office. She says the boss hired her to work as an assistant. She is an out-of-town, teenaged waitress with no credentials or relevant experience, but she is beautiful. After Sienna fills out employment paperwork, Jane is tasked with ferrying her to a luxury hotel to live at the company’s expense. Sienna’s naiveté forces Jane into a conflict between her own ambition and protecting a vulnerable girl.

A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick, also finds its major characters in a series of choices, but on a different scale. Franz (August Diehl) and Fani (Valerie Pachner) live an idyllic existence. They, along with their small children, are simple farmers in a remote Austrian village. They labor, play, and pray together in a happy home on the edge of mountain skies.

World War II shatters the serenity. Austria, which was absorbed into the Nazi project early, is asked to send her sons to war. The villagers feel some pride. Franz trains for service, along with his friends and relatives from the village. It is a bit of a serious lark for Franz, who enjoys the camaraderie and the physical elements of training in nature. He completes the cycle and returns to normalcy, with the hope that as a farmer, his day’s definition of an “essential employee,” he will be spared service.

As the war evolves, so does the village that surrounds Franz and Fani. Local politicians embrace the Nazi style and greetings are exchanged as “Heil Hitler!” Franz and Fani lament, sometimes explicitly, but mostly through worried looks and stolen moments of solitude, the degradation of their world. Franz, never one for words or public displays, wrestles with his own responsibilities to his wife and family, his nation, and his conscience.

A bicycle messenger, who carries draft notices in his basket, becomes the most menacing character. As he rattles across narrow paths, every metal squink brings terror as Franz and Fani fear Franz’s notice will come. They choose not to participate in the Nazi-sponsored relief program. They avoid the community’s revelry in the new ideology. Villagers grow in their awareness that at least one family is choosing a different path.

When the bicycle stops at their farm, events begin to overtake Franz and Fani. Franz must choose whether his principles are worth depriving his family of a husband and father. Fani must decide whether to encourage her husband to do what she knows to be right. She loves Franz and wants to keep him, but she loves him, at least in part, because of who he is becoming–a strong man with true beliefs soon to be unhidden.

The Assistant and A Hidden Life explore morality in the breach. Cruel circumstances surround Jane, Franz, and Fani–events they did not create have pulled them, inexorably, into existential crises. The characters are on the verge of suffocating under the weight of decision. The fates of their souls are in their hands, which is dramatic enough, but these films explore an additional dimension of evil.

Jane, Franz, and Fani live and work in communities. These networks are their own characters. They encircle our trio, alive with opportunities to push our protagonists toward virtue or malevolence. In almost every instance (one relative supports Franz and Fani at every turn), those who profess their love and care for Jane, Franz, and Fani, whisper rationalizations. They are agents of evil, but they are not Hitler or the Boss. They don’t murder or assault. Instead, they use their positions to persuade away from the right and the good and toward safety and betrayal. They are co-workers, friends, and parents, which is devastating, but some, like priests, bishops, and human resource directors, are formally obliged to care for those in need. Instead of succor, they offer poison, which is most dangerous when packaged as a dessert. Words of “advice” or “concern” are chocolate coatings for fear and cowardice. Franz’s bishop worries about what could happen to the church if it supports Franz. Jane’s H.R. director knows his own job may be on the line if he follows through.

Evil, wherever we find it, cannot survive on its own. We will always see it surrounded by handmaidens. The Assistant and A Hidden Life illuminate the scores of people who undermine goodness. There is power to be had and money to be made in the service of evil. There is comfort for many in the shade of darkness. We have to make sure, as we expose wrongdoing, that our lights shine bright and wide, searching always for the sniveling creatures in the corner who aid and abet horror.

*The Assistant can be streamed with a Hulu subscription, while both films are widely available for rental on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or Redbox.

**It seems obvious the character and circumstance were written to describe a Harvey Weinstein-like figure. Weinstein presided over an entertainment conglomerate and produced an array of movies and television shows. This makes this film most directly about the challenges of confronting powerful figures, even in the #MeToo era.