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? Extreme pornography? Photos of a church picnic? So the drab, drab office building that gives its name to "American Sweatshop" looks like anything. The only sign that something's amiss is the on-site consultant and employees vomiting, crying, and throwing tantrums at their desks.
Content moderation is a well-documented phenomenon, first publicized in Adrian Chen's 2014 "Wired" article, "The Workers Keeping Dick Pics and Decapitations Off Your Facebook Feed." The headline says it all: around the world, a silent army of low-wage workers manually reviews flagged content on social media to determine whether or not it violates the site's terms of service. In practice, this means being exposed to a constant stream of child sexual abuse, murder, and sexual content for hours every day, with all the damaging psychological effects one suspects can ensue.
Director: Uta Briesewitz
Writer: Matthew Nemeth
Stars: Lili Reinhart, Daniela Melchior, Jeremy Ang Jones
Multiple documentaries have followed the work of content moderators, and the 2022 Filipino film "Deleter" turned the profession into a horror film. Still, it's a relatively novel concept for a feature film, with one problem: "Red Rooms" was released last year. Pascal Plante's icy Quebecois techno-thriller isn't about content moderation per se, but its descent-into-hell structure is mimicked, intentionally or not. By comparison, "American Sweatshop" can't decide whether it's a serious ensemble drama or a provocative vigilante thriller, which speaks to the weaknesses of both the script and director Uta Briesewitz's relatively naive approach.
On the positive side, “American Sweatshop” is thoughtful and detailed, building its characters and world with small but revealing details like a close-up of Korean immigrant Paul’s (Jeremy Ang Jones) lunch box and the casualness with which aspiring nurse Daisy (Lili Reinhart) steps outside to smoke a joint during her break at the trauma factory. An early scene exposes the grotesqueness and 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 piece of advice screenwriter Matthew Nemeth could have followed for Joy’s expository dialogue later in the film. The film shows deep concern for its characters, including Daisy, her jaded work best friend Ava (Daniela Melchor), Paul, and Bob (Joel Fry), the unpredictable office character everyone suspects might snap and shoot one day. Daisy is the only one whose life outside of work is explored in detail, and she's the heroine of the aforementioned vigilante story. However, "American Sweatshop" spends so much time on the rest of the characters, especially Paul, that it's unclear which is the main plot and which the secondary one.
This undermines both of them, halting the film between Daisy's—shall we say—vague expression of anger upon seeing a particularly explicit "fetish video" called "Nail in Her" and the consequences of that incident on her daily life. The pause erases any tension that might have built up during the preceding sequences, which also include Daisy auditioning as a "model" at the same company that produced the video in order to approach its creators. That scene takes a moralistic and anticlimactic turn, as does the film itself, which struggles to diagnose an institutional problem only to propose an individual solution. Are you being grounded by a system designed to protect the rich at the expense of the poor? Try volunteering at a soup kitchen; that should help.
Briesewitz also has his issues when it comes to showing the content that so affects our characters. Given how critical the film is of pornography, comparing it to snuff films and beheading videos, it can't be too explicit or it risks being labeled hypocritical. ("The evil seeps in," as one character says.) But it needs to put the audience in Daisy's mindset, which it accomplishes by showing everything except the deaths. Titles flash on screen: "Man hit by train." "Fetus in blender." We see a person jumping off a building, but Briesewitz cuts out before they hit the ground. If this sounds like "American Sweatshop" trying to have it all, that's because it is. It wants to titillate and judge. Show and tell. Infuriate and appease. Combined with conventional direction and cinematography.
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