Office Killer, Cindy Sherman’s only feature film, was clearly a genuine stab at a Hollywood career, and not just a curiosity to be displayed in art galleries. Produced by Miramax, it stars Carol Kane, Molly Ringwald, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Michael Imperioli as colleagues at Constant Consumer magazine, which is on the verge of being downsized when the action begins. The plot ufolds in one of my favourite 90s modes – a chamber drama whose clear demarcations of space are gradually confounded by a nefarious networked presence, presaged here by a nasty cold that makes its way around the office, but coming to a head when the company reveals the reason for its downsizing: going online. Laptops are replacing people, faxes are being superseded by email, and the internet is opening up the first home-work interfaces, forcing people to be on constant call in an effort to preserve their jobs.

For Sherman, one of the greatest photographers of the human face, these technological transitions amount to one thing: a reduction of facial contact in the workplace and a radically defacefied professional sphere. The first act of the film is notable for how often Sherman elides faces and facial expressions, usually through intense close-ups of objects or body parts, and the first glimpses of horror come with her efforts to wrench the face back into focus, whether it involves coughing viscerally into a tissue, using an eye-dropper, grabbing someone else by the face, or screaming when a cartridge of printer ink explodes on the face. At the heart of it all is Dorine, an editor played by Carol Kane, who is already faceless within the organisation, and so best attuned to adapt to the new regime. At times the direction of Office Killer is a bit clunky, and you can tell Sherman’s specialty is still images, even if this does occasionally produce breathtaking photographic details, such as an ashtray full of flaming cigarettes that textures one of the critical early scenes. But Kane adds dynamism to this often static setup by virtue of the sheer mobility and motility of her face, which is the perfect Sherman surrogate and canvas: contorted, fluid, plastic, artificial, as if she’s always spilling over the edge of a convex mirror and desperately trying to get herself back in focus, centred on a volatile mouth that’s part Joan Cusack and part Cyndi Lauper.

No surprise, then, that Dorine’s face has never stabilised into a distinct professional persona at work – in some sense she has never graduated to a fully-formed work self, since she has been working at Constant Consumer ever since her father founded the company, and spends the rest of her time looking after her elderly mother, played by Alice Drummond with camp panache. She’s a work biddy – “the only thing she has in this world is her work” – and her face is as mercurial as those of her colleagues, Ringwald and Tripplehorn, are striking. Precisely because her face has never stabilised, however, Dorine enjoys a unique relation to the new faceless world of work, meaning that what starts out as an ad hoc revenge against the system turns into a total identification with modem and email, as she embarks on a killing spree and sequesters the corpses to rebuild the workplace at home, on her own terms. Working at home and killing at work, she soon realises that “the computer is my best friend” and orchestrates her murders around motifs of imminent connectivity, receiving her inspiration from the accidental death of a particularly obnoxious colleague who accidentally plugs himself into an electrical socket, thereby becoming fatal hardware. Time and again, Sherman frames these scene in repetitive and blinding waves of light – a frame stuck on a television, a photocopier transmitting sheet after sheet of paper, lightning flashing at regular and predictable intervals – as if to evoke the pulse of a new digitality, somewhere beyond television and photocopiers, preparing to homogenise the human face.

Office Killer thus plays as a transition point in Sherman’s career away from the centrality of the face – specifically, towards the nightmarish “doll” series of the late90s, which saw her cut up and arrange anatomical models and stylised viscera in surreal and lurid patterns. This shift occurs in both the strongest and most photographic segment of the film, a sustained montage sequence in which Dorine dissects and rearranges the corpses preserved in her basement like Sherman composing one of her photographs: breaking off fingernails, placing a pair of dismembered hands on top of a pile of magazines, and using masking tape to hold in the bloating viscera of a chest cavity. Sherman saves the most shocking reveal of the film for this sequence – that Dorine has included a pair of Girl Scouts among her victims – and this reiterates the doll-like quality of the violence, its hyperreal sense of detachment. Hence the Sherman-like transformation of the final scene, in which Dorine becomes doll-like, donning a blonde bob and stylszed sunglasses as she sets off for a new office. Framed elliptically in the rear vision of her car, for a moment I thought this actually was Sherman in the film, which shines brightest when it exists, like Sherman’s main body of work, at the nexus between cinema and photographs, as a sequence of uncannily hyperreal film stills.