Have you ever seen something online you just couldn’t shake? Sometimes a video rolls across our FYP or timeline that’s inexplicably violent, and before we can blink or look away, it’s scorched into our brains. Now, imagine if your job was to not look away. You’d be a content moderator, underpaid to watch one revolting video after another to determine if they meet your company’s dubious user guidelines. This is the modern hell of the sharp and smart thriller American Sweatshop.
Riverdale‘s Lili Reinhart stars as Daisy, a young woman whose days are spent approving or deleting videos shared on an unnamed social media website. Her work requires closely watching and judging videos of strangulations, fatal falls, and worse, to determine if they are within the bounds of that site’s terms of service. Shaking it off is part of the job, or so says a corporate culture that treats humans like interchangeable machines. But once Daisy sees a particularly gruesome video involving a woman, a hammer, and a nail, she can’t just bounce back. Plagued by the memory of what she saw, she needs to find out if the video was real and who’s responsible — whatever it costs.
Twisted and character-driven, American Sweatshop will have you sweating as you peek between your fingers for what happens next.
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