Horror Wednesday: American Sweatshop

 I’m just afraid of what’s gonna pop up next. 

The titular “American sweatshop” is a content moderation farm that Lili Reinart’s Daisy works at. It’s an apt name for a place where precarious workers with few other options spend hours of their lives looking at the worst possible online content, deciding if the flagged videos warrant deletion: by definition, most of the things that come across their desks and beam straight into their eyes and headphone-covered ears are horrible. Daisy’s co-worker Ava (Daniela Melchior) tells her to see the occasional porn she comes across as a relief from the avalanche of violence and terror. In that sense, the film works like a horror film, because every time that Daisy clicks on the next video queued up for her, she has to mentally prepare for the worst, like an endless series of jump scares that she has to see at least 20 seconds of, as per company policy. On the business end, the glimpses we get of how the company treats its employees shows that the primary concern is liability  - the balancing of free speech with the platform’s content policy, and what it means to have that interpreted by people with limited training. Every measure to look after the well-being of the workers seems like a half-assed brush-off; there’s a relaxation area that looks like a kid’s corner, a company counsellor who seems ill-equipped to handle the questions he’s confronted with, and a scenic little pond with an alligator in it (it might be allegorical, but this is Florida, so who knows). For a place where employees regularly faint, have panic attacks or get up to scream to relief some of the pressure, it doesn’t quite seem enough, and when Daisy needs an ambulance ride to the hospital after watching a particularly upsetting video her work doesn’t even compensate her for the bill (and of course, the job doesn’t offer health insurance). Everyone seems to be coping primarily with drugs and alcohol, and maybe even with a sense of camaraderie over their shared trauma, even as they find themselves incapable of talking about anything other than their work to each other. 

American Sweatshop is about the unseen work behind the scenes of social media. It appears to be safe from being replaced by AI because, as Daisy explains, only humans have what it takes to do this kind of work: “Computers can’t feel grief, which is technically our only real job requirement if you think about it. They’re paying us for our pain.” The work gets under everyone’s skin because everyone has something that triggers them, that seems specifically designed to cause them hurt: the newest employee in the small group of protagonists we meet finds out when he watches an animal torture video so upsetting that he is compelled to rush home and pet his own dog. Watching and witnessing costs, and everyone in this film is accruing psychological damage until they come to a breaking point. From the perspective of the company, the human cost is an inconvenience, and new workers are trained up so regularly that there’s no question that anyone who drops out is replaced quickly: the humanity of the workers might be their main qualification, but they are treated as if they were machines.
In the second half of the film, when Daisy’s inability to forget about one particular video leads her to obsession with finding out who created it, it becomes a film about the cost of witnessing violence and terror without the ability to do more about it then to delete the record if it violates content policy – policies that are frequently called out for being wrong, or too limited. The video of a woman tortured is so visceral that Daisy is haunted by it. It intrudes on her dreams, destroys her relationships, even undermines her ability to look after a neighbour’s kid, who she’s successfully steered away from devices towards enjoying films with a tub of popcorn. She goes to the cops against the request of her manager and is brushed off – either it’s fake, or at the very least it’s beyond the jurisdiction. There’s no justice to be found here, until Daisy begins investigating it like it is her crime to solve, as her emotional trauma begins expressing itself as violence. One such act ends up, ironically, in front of the eyes of a fellow content moderator (Joel Fry) concerned about her wellbeing. “What if the nastiness leaks in?”, she asks, and when it does, she makes a deliberate decision about how to proceed, even as the film appears to steer her towards a happy ending where she quits her job to finally begin her training as a nurse, as she has dreamed. She explains to a potential employer, in what seems to be a job interview, that she has learned there are three different kinds of people in the world, those who make the world better, those who make the world worse, and those who just watch: and in her estimation, the third group is the worst. As the camera pans out, we recognise the interviewer as the man who was enjoying watching the torture in the video. 
American Sweatshop doesn’t have the eloquence that made Les chambres rouges last year’s best film, but it’s still captivating, and Lili Reinhart, with another memorable performance after the great and underseen Hal & Harper, is a revelation. 


2025, directed by Uta Briesewitz, starring Lili Reinhart, Daniela Melchior, Jeremy Ang Jones, Joel Fry, Josh Whitehouse, Christiane Paul.