General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Office (2015 film)

Office (華麗上班族) is a 2015 musical comedy-drama directed by the Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To, written and produced by, and co-starring, Sylvia Chang, and set in a financial company during the 2008 global financial crisis.¹ It was shot in 3D and adapted from Chang's 2008 stage play Design for Living (華麗上班族之生活與生存).²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	華麗上班族 (Hua Li Shang Ban Zu)³
Director / writer	Johnnie To; screenplay by Sylvia Chang, who also co-produced and stars¹
Source	Chang's 2008 stage play Design for Living²
Release	September 2, 2015 (China); September 24, 2015 (Hong Kong); September 18, 2015, limited (United States)⁴^•¹
Runtime	Reported as 117 minutes by Screen and AsianWiki, and 119 minutes by IMDb and Time Out²^•⁵
Reception	88% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (32 reviews) and 50% on the Popcornmeter; a Metascore of 83¹^•⁶
Box office	$8,290,521 worldwide, of which $63,675 came from the United States and Canada⁵
Awards	Six Golden Horse Award nominations with a win for Best Art Direction; Hong Kong Film Awards wins for Best Art Direction and Best Original Film Score⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The story takes place almost entirely inside the offices of Jones & Sunn, a financial conglomerate, in the period surrounding the collapse of Lehman Brothers.⁹ CEO Winnie Chang (Sylvia Chang) prepares to list the billion-dollar company on the stock exchange, working under her lover and mentor, Chairman Ho Chung-ping (Chow Yun-Fat), before learning that his promises may not be easy to keep.¹^•²

Around this central pair, the film follows three couples: the idealistic new hire Lee Xiang (Wang Ziyi) and the mysterious Kat (Lang Yueting), who has a secret; the deputy David Wang (Eason Chan), who has mismanaged the company's funds, and the accountant Sophie (Tang Wei), whom he uses and places in danger; and Ho and Winnie themselves.⁹^•³^•² The film takes place in 2008.⁵

Production

Sylvia Chang wrote the screenplay from her own hit 2008 stage play, in which the title Design for Living has no relation to the plays of Noël Coward or Ernst Lubitsch.² To and Chang co-produced; the two had previously worked together on All About Ah-Long, reuniting 25 years later.⁷ Production companies included Shanghai Hairun Film & TV Production, Sun Entertainment Culture, Edko Films, Milky Way Image Company, Beijing Hairun Pictures Company, and Media Asia Films, with China Lion Film Distribution handling distribution in the United States.¹ The film was made in China and Hong Kong, with dialogue in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English.⁵

Design and style. To was known for crime thrillers such as Election and Drug War, and Office replaced his usual action set pieces with song-and-dance numbers.¹⁰ The film was shot in cinemascope and 3D, with production designer William Chang building a corporate world of black, white, and gray around a central clock, and reviewers compared the stylized, hermetically sealed sets to Mondrian paintings filtered through Jacques Tati.¹¹^•⁹ There are no large dance numbers; characters sing in small, composed movements, and the lyrics are direct enough that critics compared them to Bertolt Brecht's book for The Threepenny Opera.⁹

Release and reception

Office was released in China on September 2, 2015, before an international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, followed by commercial releases in Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore; it also screened at the Busan International Film Festival.²^•⁴ It was one of 13 films in the Official Competition at the BFI London Film Festival, where it received its European premiere.¹² In the United States it opened in limited release on September 18, 2015, and earned $63,675.¹^•⁵

Critical response was largely positive. Rotten Tomatoes recorded 88% on the Tomatometer from 32 reviews, with a critics consensus describing the film as "a soft critique of capitalism elegantly wrapped in a one-of-a-kind, three-dimensional musical," while audiences gave it 50%.¹ Time Out awarded five stars and called it "one of the most intoxicatingly unusual, visually entrancing and darkly funny films of recent years."¹⁰ The Chicago Reader found the overpacked plot wearing, and one audience reviewer criticized the mixing of Cantonese and Mandarin in the dialogue.¹

Awards

At the 2015 Golden Horse Awards the film received six nominations, including Best Leading Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Original Film Song, and Best Sound Effects, and won Best Art Direction.⁷ At the Hong Kong Film Awards it won Best Art Direction and Best Original Film Score, and the Hong Kong Film Critics Society named it a Film of Merit.⁸

The Korean film of the same name

A separate 2015 film titled Office is a South Korean thriller directed by Hong Won-chan, his feature debut, in which a worker slaughters his family and returns unseen to his workplace. It premiered as a midnight screening at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and grossed $2,575,130 in South Korea on 441,208 admissions.¹³^•¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026