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Uta Briesewitz’s American Sweatshop opens with a paradox: a workplace comedy shrouded in horror. Inside an anonymous office building, fluorescent lights glare over rows of young workers whose job is not to make widgets or process spreadsheets, but to filter the internet’s sewage. These are the moderators, the human firewalls who spare the rest of us from encountering images of brutality, exploitation, and depravity. Their labor is invisible, unglamorous, and deeply corrosive. And yet, Briesewitz presents this world not merely as social critique, but as the backdrop for a modern thriller — a hybrid that wants to unsettle as much as it wants to entertain.
At its center is Daisy Moriarty (Lili Reinhart), a would-be nurse who finds herself locked into this psychological sweatshop of digital sanitation. Daisy is not so much a protagonist as a prism: through her, we glimpse the paradoxes of our mediated lives, where every image can be both entertainment and evidence, where intimacy coexists with atrocity. When Daisy encounters a particularly disturbing video — a woman restrained, screaming, a nail poised to puncture flesh — she refuses to accept the company line that it’s likely a fake. The film then pivots from workplace portraiture to obsessive mystery, as Daisy ventures beyond her screen to confront the people who might be responsible.
The setup is promising. Cinema has long thrived on stories of surveillance and obsession, from Coppola’s The Conversation to De Palma’s Blow Out. Briesewitz clearly intends to update that lineage for the algorithmic age, where content moderation is a form of voyeurism imposed by necessity, and where the abyss of the internet is bottomless. Yet what distinguishes American Sweatshop is its insistence that this abyss is not only technological, but existential. Watching, sorting, flagging, deleting: the work Daisy and her colleagues perform mirrors the endless digital routines of the rest of us. Doomscrolling is only a less remunerated form of moderation.
The film is strongest in its early sequences, when it lingers on the absurdities and cruelties of this office world. Christiane Paul, as Joy, the manager, delivers protocols with bureaucratic precision: a video of an animal slaughtered for food is acceptable, but if the same animal is killed without consumption, it constitutes abuse. “Nuance is key,” she insists — a mantra that doubles as satire and despair. Daisy’s breakroom banter with Ava (Daniela Melchor), or the glimpse of Paul (Jeremy Ang Jones) quietly eating his boxed lunch, sketch out a workplace at once banal and grotesque. Briesewitz allows the horror to seep in gradually, conveyed not by gore but by the eruptions of her characters: vomiting, screaming, or simply breaking down mid-shift.
But the film cannot sustain this tonal balance. Once Daisy embarks on her vigilante quest, American Sweatshop becomes divided against itself. Is it an ensemble drama about the psychological toll of invisible labor, or a thriller about one woman’s pursuit of justice? It strains to be both, but rarely integrates the two. The result is a stop-start rhythm: tension builds, then evaporates in exposition or subplot; an incisive portrait of trauma gives way to a conventional genre beat.
Reinhart’s performance nearly rescues this split. Best known for Riverdale, she has here the opportunity to inhabit a character defined not by irony but by fracture. Daisy’s numbness is not apathy but compressed fury, and Reinhart shades her with unpredictable shifts — resignation, then obsession, then icy determination. In her hands, Daisy’s search for the truth of the “Nail in Her” video feels less like detective work than a desperate attempt at self-reconstitution. Unfortunately, the screenplay (by Matthew Nemeth) often hesitates where Reinhart lunges. It gestures at systemic critique — the exploitative labor conditions, the corporate indifference, the impossibility of shielding oneself from mediated violence — but too often retreats to platitudes. Its proposed remedy for systemic rot veers toward individual charity, as if volunteering at a soup kitchen could balance the scales of digital cruelty.
Visually, American Sweatshop mirrors its thematic ambivalence. The cinematography is drab, almost documentary in its palette, as if to underscore the ordinariness of horror. But Briesewitz cannot resist conventional thriller flourishes: shadowy alleys, foreboding music, a climactic confrontation that feels imported from another film. She is most confident when withholding, letting titles and sounds suggest atrocities rather than staging them outright. A brief shot of a man leaping before the camera cuts away, or the chillingly matter-of-fact appearance of file names like “Fetus in Blender,” accomplish far more than any explicit depiction could. The implication is clear: we live in a culture where even death is packaged as content.
What lingers after the credits is not the thriller’s denouement but the unsettling questions the film only half-articulates. How does one distinguish between performance and reality in a world where everything is documented? What is the psychic cost of seeing too much? And how complicit are we, the audience, in demanding that someone else sift through the refuse so that our feeds remain bearable? Briesewitz gestures toward these questions without fully pursuing them, but their resonance extends beyond the film itself. The internet, after all, is not only a platform for distraction; it is also a stage for cruelty, a marketplace for outrage, a vault of evidence. Moderators like Daisy exist precisely because the rest of us would rather not look too closely.
In this sense, American Sweatshop is less a complete artistic statement than a mirror held up to our moment. Like the videos it evokes, it is difficult to shake — not because it achieves cinematic perfection, but because it implicates us. We exit the theater asking not just what Daisy saw, but what we, too, have chosen to watch, ignore, or scroll past. That may be the film’s truest accomplishment: forcing us to confront the paradox that our digital lives are sustained by unseen suffering.
And yet, one wishes Briesewitz had trusted her material enough to push harder. Adrian Chen’s seminal 2014 Wired article revealed the “silent army” of moderators who absorb humanity’s worst images so that corporations may continue profiting. Documentaries have since amplified these voices; the Filipino horror film Deleter turned the profession into a nightmare. American Sweatshop had the opportunity to merge these realities with the propulsion of genre filmmaking, to be both critique and thriller. Instead, it oscillates, ultimately satisfied with provocation rather than transformation.
Still, even in its compromises, the film is a reminder that cinema, like the internet it critiques, is a repository of images that refuse to fade. Daisy’s haunted face, Reinhart’s weary defiance, the flicker of grotesque file names — these remain lodged in the imagination, spectral reminders of what our digital age demands from those who keep its surface clean.
In the end, American Sweatshop may not fully earn its ambitions, but it does succeed in one vital respect: it unsettles. It is a story about screens that leaves us staring uneasily at our own. And perhaps that, in a culture anesthetized by constant viewing, is itself a modest triumph.
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