The Hating Game

In the film The Hating Game, Lucy Hutton (played by Emily Blunt) starts her career as a personal assistant, tasked with supporting the bigwigs at the publishing company. At first, she seems perfectly happy to do as she's told and accept her place in the hierarchy. However, beneath this tranquil surface, Lucy is driven by an eagerness to excel without sacrificing her morals. She notices a new hire, Joshua Templeman (played by Chris Evans), who makes his stunning presence felt throughout the office with his unapologetic and peremptory demeanor. Lucy is immediately put off by his condescending attitude towards the other assistants, even those who work for people more junior to him. This stance especially infuriates her as she witnesses him carelessly breaking the rules and disregarding their superiors. A series of intense interactions between Lucy and Joshua begins to escalate their mutual mistrust and frustration with each other. One of the first episodes starts when they engage in a heated argument as they attempt to outdo each other during an office scavenger hunt. They simultaneously try to prove themselves as hard workers to the senior employees while clashing with each other and challenging the status quo. As their animosity towards one another grows, Lucy discovers the lengths Joshua is willing to go for success. Lucy begins with her strong work ethic but struggles to understand Joshua's motivations for sabotaging others and appearing extremely pretentious about his own ability. Her disapproval increases as she spots him dismissing an assistant due to slight errors in her work, as well as manipulating information in favor of himself at the expense of others. However, despite her aversion, the viewers see flashes of an undercurrent in their tense interactions. Noticing how their rivalry is sparking and growing, she uses it to build her foundations at the company. Eventually, their one-upmanship evolves into a cat-and-mouse game of trying to one-up each other at work. Their strained relationship may be annoying but consistently keeps them pushing towards professional perfection, or so it seems. Nonetheless, beneath these icy exteriors, subtleties of Lucy and Joshua slowly begin to reveal an attraction they're hesitant to acknowledge. It is a clever sub-mechanism of the Hating Game: Lucy unconsciously makes subtle hints at charm to check how far Joshua will go to pursue this elusive idea. Though Joshua never catches these cues at first, his frustration appears genuine as he struggles with the emerging impressions he gets of Lucy. She provides genuine support at the right times and provides him glimpses of softer sides of herself which complicates his usual icy demeanor thus making him wonder about her intentions. With the increasing odds influencing the entire office environment and increasingly frequent run-ins with Lucy, Joshua has no other choice but grow more enigmatic to those around him to camouflage the rising feelings which mirror the exact negative emotions he’s spent ages practicing of hatred – resulting in growing confusion within his character. Even worse, some instances demonstrate that they both still retain their competitive edge but are losing grip on their once icy professionalism simultaneously, turning the film more and more into a mixture of dark-comedy.