‘American Sweatshop’ Review: Lili Reinhart Faces The Horror Of Social Media In A Psychological Thriller [SXSW]

AUSTIN – The internet, for all the ways it connects us and opens up our worlds, is also an often hellish place. Social media, in particular, are increasingly concentrated places to witness all our capacity for cruelty in an endless scroll. All one needs to do is look at the site formerly known as Twitter to see post after post of everything from AI-generated spam to open hate speech to get a sense of just how horrible these spaces can be. It’s a poison to the minds of all who use them. 

In “American Sweatshop,” the initially dynamic directorial debut of Ute Briesewitz starring a compelling and committed Lili Reinhart (“Riverdale”), we are taken into this technological nightmare through the lens of “content moderators” who must repeatedly witness everything from beheadings to animal torture in order to remove them. It is one of the most demoralizing and uniquely depressing modern jobs one can think of, though don’t expect this film to offer a deep, incisive portrait of what toll this takes on those hired to do it or what they see say about the rest of us. While it occasionally raises interesting questions surrounding the predatory businesses that hire these workers and the exploitation inherent to the grim gig they take on, it does little to interrogate them before becoming a more uncertain psychological thriller. 

This is all seen through the eyes of the troubled Daisy (Reinhart), who spends her working days staring at a computer as one reported post after another flash in front of her. Alongside row after row of fellow content moderators, she must watch every video and decide if it should stay up. Early on, she spends time just watching porn with a blank expression on her face, numb to what she is seeing and the world around her. When nudged by her coworker and friend Ava (played by an underutilized Daniela Melchior) to move on, Daisy confesses she’d instead drag her feet watching something merely sexually explicit rather than whatever violent and depraved horror awaits her with the next click. When she clocks out for the day, she mostly keeps to herself in her apartment, smoking weed, browsing Tinder, and scrolling a feed that has been moderated to be free of anything horrific by people just like her. But she always returns back to the bland office where, one day, a brutal video begins to haunt her mind and soul. 

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Initially, the film finds something quite effective in how it practices restraint. Rarely do we see a full video of the workers watching as we mainly observe the impact it has on them via their reactions and the familiar yet inescapable discomfort that has come to define their work. It prevents the experience from ever becoming exploitative or manipulative, relying on the sound of something playing while our minds fill in the rest. For large stretches, we are just stuck in the same old office along with the workers as the mind-numbing rhythms of witnessing such an unstoppable stream of horrific posts start to wear on us. One could almost imagine there being a version of this film that’s closer to something like “The Assistant” that relied on a more minimalistic yet shattering framing. Instead, “American Sweatshop” increasingly overplays its hand and begins to spiral out alongside its central character. 

This spiraling begins when Daisy watches the aforementioned specific video that involves a hammer, a nail, and upsetting violence towards a woman that rattles her like no other has. It causes her to pass out, and when she awakens, she wants to take greater action beyond just removing the video. This is no easy task as it is something her self-serving boss dismisses as being merely extreme fetish porn, though Daisy insists it is not simulated violence but the real thing. The images from the video flash across her mind constantly and come to define nearly all of her waking moments, which is where the restraint from before starts to fade. This is then upended even further as Daisy decides that she’ll have to take matters into her own hands, becoming drawn into darker, yet broadly sketched, violent impulses of her own. Though it will draw comparisons to the often riveting recent “Red Rooms,” there is a better reference point. 

Without going too far down the rabbit hole of where this takes her, “American Sweatshop” proves to be less a thoughtful, modern look at labor exploitation and our online spaces than it is a spiritual successor of sorts to the largely forgotten 1999 film “8MM.” Though Nicolas Cage’s film centered on what was believed to be a real snuff film, it could not be more different in both era and technology; the pursuits both set us on are pretty similar. This is also not a good thing as each becomes more standard, yet there are still plenty of haphazard thrillers that nearly fall apart. What sets “American Sweatshop” apart is that it doesn’t build to anything thematically substantial, instead leaving little insight into either Daisy’s transformation or who she even was in the first place. 

Even as Reinhart does solid work with the shaky material, her character remains adrift in a meandering psychological thriller that offers only a superficial look into her psyche. That the side characters are left with even less to work with ensures “American Sweatshop” has little to show for itself as either a potentially tense genre film or a thoughtful drama. While there will always be a hellish underside to the online spaces we create and inhabit, this is not the film to take us into them with the needed depth as it instead prioritizes a more odd “twist” of an ending. Though Daisy may find what she is seeking, we are left still looking for something more. [C]

“American Sweatshop” had its World Premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. 

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