Rain pressed itself against the glass towers of Brooklyn like a shareholder demanding answers. Inside a warehouse polished into startup mythology, twenty-somethings floated across scooters carrying green juice and private panic. The office smelled faintly of burnt espresso, new sneakers, and ambition disguised as optimism. Computer screens flickered like miniature slot machines. Every notification promised relevance. Every silence threatened extinction. Somewhere between the open-concept desks and motivational typography, a strange loneliness moved through the room wearing expensive headphones.
The Intern turns that loneliness into something unsettlingly familiar. The film arrives wrapped in charm, soft jazz, and warm smiles, yet beneath the polished surface sits a quiet autopsy of modern work culture. A retired widower named Ben Whittaker, played with remarkable gentleness by Robert De Niro, enters a hyper-growth fashion startup run by Jules Ostin, portrayed by Anne Hathaway. Most films about startups worship disruption like a new religion. This one studies the emotional debris left behind after the sermon ends. That difference matters more than people realize.
Modern business culture loves speed because speed hides insecurity. The faster a company moves, the less time anyone has to ask whether the direction even makes sense. Ben walks into this environment like a man entering a casino after surviving a shipwreck. Calm becomes his rebellion. Presence becomes his strategy. A younger employee named Davis rushes through meetings while eating protein bars like survival rations. One late evening, fluorescent lights buzzing above tired faces, Davis confesses he has not eaten dinner with his daughter in weeks. The line lands quietly. No dramatic soundtrack. Just the sound of keyboards clicking like distant rain. It feels less like dialogue and more like a confession overheard through an office wall.
The genius of the film sits inside that tension between usefulness and worth. Modern capitalism often treats human beings like phone batteries. Valuable when charged. Disposable when depleted. Ben disrupts that equation simply by refusing to perform urgency. He folds suits carefully. He listens fully. He remembers names. In another era those qualities were ordinary. Inside startup culture they look almost radical. There is a brutal irony buried here: organizations spend millions studying leadership frameworks while ignoring the emotional steadiness sitting right beside them. Management consultant Peter Drucker once argued that culture eats strategy for breakfast. This film quietly adds another truth: wisdom gets ignored when youth becomes a branding exercise.
A logistics founder from Rotterdam named Mireille learned that lesson painfully. Her company scaled fast after a viral sustainability campaign pushed investors into a frenzy. Staff doubled almost overnight. Slack channels multiplied like weeds after rain. One exhausted designer fell asleep inside a bathroom stall during product launch week. Nobody noticed for hours. Then an older operations advisor named Henrik began arriving early each morning carrying paper notebooks instead of tablets. Younger staff laughed at him gently, the way people humor someone they assume has become obsolete. Within months, employee turnover dropped. Meetings shortened. Customer complaints softened. Henrik did almost nothing flashy. He simply slowed the emotional metabolism of the company. Strange how often survival looks boring at first glance.
The film also slices into a cultural insecurity nobody enjoys discussing openly: many ambitious people fear becoming irrelevant more than they fear failure. Jules does not merely fear losing her company. She fears losing the identity built around being needed. That anxiety hangs over the film like cold winter fog. In one remarkable stretch, crowded schedules and investor pressure begin swallowing her marriage whole. Her husband Matt, played by Anders Holm, becomes less a partner and more a spectator trapped inside the machinery of her ambition. The movie refuses easy villains because the real antagonist is structural. Hustle culture sells empowerment while quietly draining intimacy from the people consuming it.
There is a moment involving a car ride that says more about leadership than most airport business books ever will. Ben drives through crowded streets with the patience of a jazz musician finding rhythm inside chaos. Nobody raises their voice. Nobody delivers a grand speech. Yet the scene radiates authority because true leadership rarely needs theatrical volume. Hollywood often confuses dominance with competence. This film understands something subtler. Calm people terrify chaotic systems because they expose how much panic has been normalized. That insight feels almost dangerous in an economy addicted to performative exhaustion.
Even the fashion startup itself becomes symbolic of something larger. The company sells curated identity while struggling to maintain its own emotional coherence. That contradiction mirrors modern digital life perfectly. Social media turned personal branding into unpaid labor. LinkedIn transformed ordinary employment into an endless audition. Everyone is optimizing. Everyone is networking. Everyone is exhausted. Ben represents a disappearing archetype: a person who does not treat every conversation like a transaction. Watching him navigate the office feels strangely emotional because viewers recognize how rare that behavior has become. Somewhere along the road to innovation, many organizations quietly abandoned dignity in favor of momentum.
Near the end, the atmosphere changes. Not dramatically. More like the air inside a cathedral after candles burn low. The noise softens. The frantic rhythm loosens its grip. A younger generation begins noticing that efficiency without emotional grounding eventually mutates into emptiness. Outside the office windows, the city still glows with ambition and insomnia. Taxis still slide through wet streets carrying people toward meetings they secretly resent. Yet something deeper lingers beneath the film’s warmth. It asks whether modern success has accidentally engineered a civilization terrified of stillness. It asks whether usefulness has become the only language left for love. And somewhere inside that uncomfortable silence, the film leaves behind a truth sharp enough to follow people home: the future may belong to innovation, but survival still belongs to those who remember how to remain human.
Editorial Disclaimer: Whether a film is rooted in fiction or inspired by real events, the actions, decisions, and behaviors portrayed within are not intended to be encouraged, replicated, or endorsed in real-world settings. This review exists solely to analyze the storytelling, characters, themes, and business dynamics presented in the film for educational, analytical, and entertainment purposes. Any ethical or unethical conduct depicted in the film does not reflect the views, values, or endorsements of ESYRITE.
