Societal Objectivist Comedy

Nicotine paints a fragmented, sharp and darkly comic portrait of a workplace that has drifted into absurdity. On the smoking terrace of a large corporation, a parade of employees passes through the day as though navigating a succession of micro-crises: stressed managers, disillusioned interns, security guards, IT technicians, senior executives, temps, HR officers and sales reps — all revealing their anxieties, ambitions and self-deceptions. Through these encounters emerge the torments of contemporary working life: outsourcing, workplace burnout, layoffs, corporate suicides, security paranoia, toxic coaching, ecological guilt and an obsession with productivity. Alternately hilarious and unsettling, these scenes form a choral mosaic in which everyone struggles to survive inside a system that surpasses — and often crushes — them. The result is a social comedy that is both light and ferocious, holding up a mirror to a professional world in permanent freefall.