Even in the relatively regulated world of the contemporary internet, you never know what the person next to you is looking at on their phone: Fascist propaganda? Hardcore pornography? Photos from a church picnic? So it goes that the gray, featureless office building that gives “American Sweatshop” its title looks like it could be anything. The only sign that something is off here is the on-site counselor — and the employees vomiting and crying and having rage-filled tantrums at their desks.
Content moderation is a well-documented phenomenon, first brought to widespread public attention by Adrian Chen’s 2014 “Wired” article “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.” The headline there says it all: Around the world, a silent army of low-wage workers manually review flagged content on social-media sites to determine whether or not it violates the site’s terms of service. 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 one suspects might follow.
Multiple documentaries have followed content moderators at work, and the 2022 Filipino movie “Deleter” turned the profession into a horror film. Still, it’s relatively fresh as a concept for a feature, with one problem: “Red Rooms” came out last year. Pascal Plante’s chilly Quebecois techno-thriller isn’t about content moderation per se, but its descent-into-hell structure is — intentionally or not — mimicked here. By comparison, “American Sweatshop” can’t decide if it’s an earnest ensemble drama or an edgy vigilante thriller, which speaks to the weaknesses of both the screenplay and director Uta Briesewitz’s relatively artless approach to the material.
On the plus side, “American Sweatshop” is thoughtful and detailed, building its characters and their world with small, but revealing beats like a closeup of Korean immigrant Paul’s (Jeremy Ang Jones) boxed lunch and the casualness with which aspiring nurse Daisy (Lili Reinhart) steps out to smoke a joint while on break at the trauma factory. An opening scene lays out the grotesque absurdity of the situation, as office manager Joy (Christiane Paul) delineates between culinary content and animal abuse in a meeting. If a person kills an animal on camera, that’s abuse. If they kill an animal and eat it, that’s cooking.
“Nuance is 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 an earnest concern for its characters, including Daisy, her jaded work bestie Ava (Daniela Melchor), Paul, and Bob (Joel Fry), the office wild card who everyone suspects might snap and shoot up the place someday. Daisy is the only one whose life outside of work is explored in any detail, and is the heroine of the vigilante storyline referenced above. However, “American Sweatshop” spends enough time with the rest of them, particularly Paul, that it’s unclear which is the “A” plot and which is the “B” one.
This weakens both of them, bringing the film to a halt in between Daisy’s — let’s say — imprecise expression of her rage over seeing an especially graphic “fetish video” called “Nail in Her” and the consequences of that incident in her everyday life. The pause obliterates any tension that might have built up during previous sequences, which also include Daisy auditioning as a “model” at the same company that produced the video in order to get closer to the people who made it. That scene takes a moralistic, anticlimactic turn — as does the movie itself, which goes to a lot of trouble to diagnose an institutional problem only to propose an individual solution. Are you being ground into dust by a system designed to protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor? Try volunteering at a soup kitchen, that should help.
Briesewitz is similarly conflicted when it comes to actually showing the content that so affects our characters. Given how judgmental the film ultimately is about pornography, equating it with snuff films and beheading videos, she can’t get too graphic or else risk being labeled a hypocrite. (“The nastiness leaks in,” as one character says.) But she needs to put the audience into Daisy’s mindset, which she accomplishes by showing everything short of the deaths themselves. Titles flash on the screen: “Man Run Over By Train.” “Fetus in Blender.” We see a person jumping off of a building, but Briesewitz cuts away before they hit the ground.
If this sounds like “American Sweatshop” is trying to have it both ways, that’s because it is. It wants to titillate, and to judge. To show, and to tell. To enrage, and to pacify. Combined with the by-the-numbers direction and unremarkable cinematography, the overall effect is of an after-school special about how social media is bad for you — which it probably is, to be fair.
Grade: C+
“American Sweatshop” premiered at SXSW 2025. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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