AMERICAN SWEATSHOP - Mark Reviews Movies

American Sweatshop, Brainstorm Media

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

It's bad enough being on social media sometimes, but it could be much worse. American Sweatshop follows the experiences of a content moderator for a fictional online platform. At one point, she refers to herself as a "first responder" for the internet, a statement that's meant to be a bit humorous and filled with a lot of the character's coping about how absolutely terrible her job actually is.

Honestly, though, she has something of a point, because imagine if, with these platforms increasingly working to throw more and more unsolicited content at its users, the worst of the worst kinds of content were just out there in the digital ether. We'd all go madder than this online world has already made us.

Daisy (Lili Reinhart), the main character, becomes a case in point about that. The film, which sets itself up as a thriller but cleverly subverts that notion by the end, is mostly a study of how Daisy and her co-workers, sitting in front of monitors at a long desks to watch violent videos and hateful rantings for hours at a time, can become so desensitized to what they see on a screen that the real world stops seeming so, well, real.

Take one of those colleagues. He's a guy named Bob (Joel Fry), and Bob has a tendency to lash out when the sights of too many gruesome deaths and the sounds of overt bigotry become too much for him. Bob will get up from his chair, throw his headphones or whatever else is near his workspace, and yell about how the easiest solution to all of this awful content would be to burn down this building.

Nobody—except for Paul (Jeremy Ang Jones), a new employee in what must be a long and constant line of new hires—even flinches at Bob's most recent outburst. In any other business, a worker openly and loudly threatening to burn down the building would almost certainly be grounds for immediate termination or, at least, a lengthy talk with someone in the human resources department.

Here, though, nobody thinks twice about what Bob says. For one thing, they know he's not serious, and for another, they all understand exactly where he's coming from with his eruption of utter frustration. Bob makes a salient point to the company's on-site counselor (played by Tim Plester), who also has surely heard everything enough times to spend sessions doodling in the margins of his notes. The employees who don't speak up about their feelings are the ones who should really concern the higher-ups.

The film, written by Matthew Nemeth and directed by Uta Briesewitz, seems to understand this job and its effects in a very specific way. Yes, it would be incredibly difficult to have to watch violence, death, and hate of all sorts day after day. At one point, a video of what's presumably animal abuse (We don't know for certain, because the film only offers glimpses of images and uses sounds to suggest the actual content) comes across Paul's screen. He simply gets up, gathers his things, and goes home to see and sob in front of his dog.

The more telling thing, though, is that Paul is back at work for the rest of the story that takes place at the company. He went to graduate school for computer coding but, in that competitive field, has found himself at this job to pay the bills. It's not as if he can simply walk away for good at the moment. Since the work also depends on emotion, Paul or some other coder isn't going to create a program that can replace humans anytime soon, if ever.

However, this is Daisy's story, although the fact that the narrative's supporting characters and smaller details are worth discussion shows that the filmmakers have created a richer story than just matters of its plot. Daisy is like the rest of her co-workers—always watching the worst humanity has to offer, trying to forget it once a shift is finished (Daisy likes drinking and smoking marijuana to help, eventually bringing a vape device to work), hoping that life has more in store for her soon. She's studying to become a nurse, using online videos to do so, because the internet isn't all bad, after all. Until then, this is her job and her life.

One video, flagged by users as being too violent, shows up on Daisy's monitor. It shows a woman tied down to a mattress, an eerie-looking man watching from the side, and another man grabbing a hammer and an especially long nail. Daisy doesn't just think the content should be removed. She believes it might be evidence of a real crime being committed, but her boss (played by Christiane Paul) points out that bringing in law enforcement could have consequences for the company.

That leaves Daisy to obsess about the video, its implications of real-world criminality, and finding some way to determine if the content was staged or genuine. Whether her investigation actually goes anywhere within the plot is almost irrelevant to the point. The film is more about the effects of a steady diet of such videos, as well as how no one seems to have an answer for helping people in this line of work to legitimately deal with it.

There probably isn't an answer, in the same way that social media itself has become so pervasive that it has changed how our brains work in so many ways, and it did so before anyone had a chance to study or even consider those consequences. American Sweatshop, then, isn't a warning, because it's probably too late for that. It's a mirror.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products