Even in the relatively regulated world on the contemporary internet you never know what the person next to you is looking at their phone: Fascist propaganda? Hardcore pornography? Photos from a church pocket? So it is possible that the gray, performanceless office building that gives “American sweatshop“The title looks like it can be anything. The only sign that something is here is in place adviser-and the employees vomiting and crying and have furiously filled rage at their desks.
Content moderation is a well -documented phenomenon, first brought to the widespread public’s attention by Adrian Chen’s article “Wired” 2014 “” “The workers who keep cock pictures and beheadings from your Facebook feed. “The headline there says everything: Around the world, a silent army of low -wage workers manually flagged content on social media examines to determine whether it violates the site’s terms of use or not. In practice, this means being exposed to a constant stream of csam, murder and Sexual content For hours every day, with all the harmful psychological effects that you suspect can follow.
Several documentaries have followed content moderators at work, and the Philippine movie “Deletter” 2022 turned the profession into a horror film. Yet it is relatively healthy as a concept for a function, with a problem: “Red rooms” came out last year. Pascal Plante’s chilly Quebecois-Techno-Thriller is not about content moderation in itself, but its descending-to-heaven-heavenly structure is-intentionally or not-in-like here. By comparison, “American sweatshop” cannot decide whether it is a serious ensemble drama or a wild vigilante thriller, which speaks to the weaknesses of both script and director UTA BRIESEWITZrelatively artless attitude to the material.
On the plus side, “American sweatshop” is thought -provoking and detailed, builds their characters and their world with small, but revealing beats as a close -up of Korean immigrant Pauls (Jeremy Ang Jones) boxed lunch and the coincidence that the future nurse Daisy (Lili Reinhart) goes on to smoke a while to smoke a smoke while smoking a smoking time to smoke a mutual. An opening scene puts out the grotesque absurdity of the situation, as office manager Joy (Christiane Paul) delimits between culinary content and animal abuse in a meeting. If a person kills an animal on the camera, it’s abuse. If they kill an animal and eat it, it is cooking.
“Nuance is the key,” she says, a tip that screenwriter Matthew Nemeth could have taken for himself when it comes to Joy’s Expository dialogue later in the film. The film has a serious concern for its characters, including Daisy, her broken work Bestie Ava (Daniela Melchor), Paul and Bob (Joel Fry), the office Wild Card that everyone suspects can be snapped and postpone one day. Daisy is the only one whose life outside work is explored in any detail and is the hero of the Vigilante history mentioned above. But “American sweatshop” spends enough time with the rest of them, especially Paul, that it is unclear which is the “A” plot and which is “B”.
This weakens both, and stops the film between Daisy’s – let’s say – implicitly expression of her rage to see a particularly graphic “fetish video” called “Nail in her” and the consequences of that incident in her everyday life. The break wipes out all tension that may have built up during previous sequences, which also includes Daisy Auditioning as a “model” at the same company that produced the video to get closer to the people who did it. That scene takes a moral, anti -limactic turn – as well as the film itself, which is a lot of trouble diagnosing an institutional problem just to suggest an individual solution. Do you go to the dust of a system designed to protect the rich at the expense of the poor? Try voluntarily in a soup kitchen, which should help.
Briesewitz is similarly in conflict when it comes to actually showing the content that affects our characters so. Given how judgmental film is ultimately about pornography, it resembles it with snuff movies and beheading videos, she cannot be too graphic or otherwise risk being labeled as a hypocrite. (“Nastiness leaks in”, as a character says.) But she has to put the audience in Daisy’s way of thinking, which she achieves by showing everything short from the deaths themselves. Titles flash on the screen: “You run over by train.” “Foster in Blender.” We see a person jumping off a building, but Briawitz cuts away before hitting the ground.
If this sounds like “American sweatshop” tries to have it both ways, it is because it is. It wants to titillate and judge. To show and tell. To demolish and calm. Combined with the direction of the number and unreasonable cinematography, the overall effect of a special after school about how social media is bad for you-what it probably is, to be fair.
Rating: C+
“American Sweatshop” premiered at SXSW 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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