Warning: This post contains spoilers for American Sweatshop
Though it’s not a horror movie, American Sweatshop will get under your skin. Directed by Uta Briesewitz and written by Matthew Nemeth, the film follows Tallahassee resident Daisy (Lili Reinhart) as she does what may just be the worst job in the world. She’s a content moderator, sitting at a computer for hours a day watching videos from the darkest edges of the internet. Day in and day out, Daisy is inundated with images of violence, sex, and other unspeakable things that have been uploaded online, and her job is to delete them or keep them based on company policy.
When Daisy comes across a video that is too disturbing to ignore, she goes on a long journey to seek justice. American Sweatshop explores the nastiest, most unfiltered parts of the internet, and how consuming explicit content impacts our day-to-day lives. Here’s what to know about the film’s twist ending and what happens to Daisy.
What happens in American Sweatshop?
Daisy fights hard to keep the haunting images and sounds at bay outside of working hours, but one day she comes across a video that unsettles her so thoroughly that it threatens to destabilize her entire life. It’s a torture porn video of a woman getting impaled with a nail. Despite every effort, Daisy cannot shake the sights and sounds of the video. She attempts to report it to the police and her superiors, but they both brush it off and say there’s nothing they can do about it. So Daisy takes matters into her own hands.
Even though Daisy deletes the video, it still exists on various websites. Daisy uploads the video to a forum, hoping that someone can help her track the location of the man in the video, whose face she can’t get out of her head. A commenter gives her the address of someone in Ripley, Georgia, so Daisy sets off on a four-hour journey across state lines to find him. She stakes out the man’s house and follows him to a movie theatre. Afterwards, she confronts him, and he’s horrified when she shows him the video. She’s got the wrong guy. Turns out she was baited by the commenter, who wanted her to suffer for posting the video. In a distressing twist, Daisy can’t escape the unlimited cruelty of the internet away from work, either.
Daisy keeps trying to find him. During a break at work, she asks her colleague Paul (Jeremy Ang Jones) for help. Paul refuses, worried that Daisy will fall into a dangerous path by pursuing a stranger so obsessively.
Then, Daisy makes a bold decision to message the creator of the video, Klipspringer Films, saying she wants to be in their next video. At the bar, she talks to the bartender about her problems. “This is why porn’s a good thing,” he responds, “people get nasty urges and instead of acting on them, they watch a video, and like magic, the nastiness is gone. “What happens when you watch a video and the nastiness sneaks in?” she asks. Eventually, they head outside, and they’re about to get intimate. But her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic; she physically assaults a bartender with his belt, leaving him crying on the floor outside the bar.
While watching her neighbor’s kid, she gets a response from Klipspringer—they’re about to shoot their next film, and they need her tonight. Not wanting to miss her chance to confront those she believes are responsible, Daisy heads off to the set, leaving the child behind. It’s a sharp contrast to the Daisy we saw pre-video, where she was warm, affectionate, and understanding to her neighbor’s daughter. But Daisy is a different person now, irritable, irresponsible, and reckless in her quest for answers. Arriving on set, Daisy’s immediately uneasy and uncomfortable, but the man who greets her is jovial and comforting. Still, Daisy wants to back out, and while he tries to get her to stay, he acquiesces and wishes her well. But before she leaves, Daisy observes the man’s shoes, the same ones from the video, confirming he was part of the scene that’s tormented her for weeks. She sprays him with pepper spray and trashes the set, breaking the camera before she escapes.
How American Sweatshop ends
Days after the incident, Daisy seems better. She’s studying with the help of her new boyfriend to for the nursing exams, hoping to leave behind content moderation and try again at her dream of being a nurse. But when they sleep together, she’s disturbed by a banging sound from the next-door neighbor and freaks out, the sound of the nail in the video still lodged in her head. She bangs on the wall and screams furiously at the neighbor, which panics her boyfriend. After yelling, she wants to have sex, but he doesn’t want to anymore, so she ends their relationship. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t keep her demons at bay.
Paul experiences his own visceral trauma at work, witnessing a video of an animal being tortured (after which he leaves work to head home to hug his dog). He changes course and gives Daisy the name of the man she’s been seeking. He’s hesitant to give it to her, but he wants Daisy to find peace. But the next scene heavily implies peace is not what she’s after: At home, she learns that human flesh is similar to beef on the internet, so she practices driving nails through a thick steak.
Then, Daisy attracts unwanted attention. Bob (Joel Fry), Daisy’s colleague, shows her a video he came across while moderating—it’s of Daisy assaulting the bartender. Horrified to see that her own acts of violence are being celebrated in the same way as the video that traumatized her (the title of Daisy’s video calls her a “girlboss” for attacking a man), she tries to change things. After an unsuccessful work therapy session, she puts in her two-week notice and devotes all her free time to preparing for the nursing exams. She’s also volunteering at a soup kitchen, and even while she’s at work, she’s focusing on nursing. After two weeks, she logs off work for the final time and leaves the office without saying a word. Finally, she’s free.
In the final scene, the camera zooms in slowly on Daisy, eyebrows furrowed with an intense glare in her eyes. That disappears into a smile when she’s called by a man for her interview. The man questions Daisy, as the camera swirls around Daisy, keeping her in focus while obscuring the man’s identity. Something she says confuses him—she tells the interviewer that she’d rather make the world worse than sit back and do nothing. It’s not exactly something a nursing hopeful should be saying, but Daisy has no interest in holding back her true feelings. It leads to the following exchange:
Daisy: “Bad things happen no matter what. And sometimes, the only way to stop a bad thing, is another bad thing.”
Interviewer: “I’m not sure I agree with you there.”
Daisy: “Well, I thought you might.”
An uneasy feeling creeps in, and the camera reveals that the person Daisy is being interviewed by is none other than the man in the video who’s terrorized her mind. It’s a crushing realization: Daisy hasn’t done all of this to become a nurse; she’s passed the exams so she could get to this precise moment. In the final shot, she turns away from the man and looks directly into the camera, flashing a slight smile, ending the film. Earlier, Daisy said all she wanted was to look in his eyes and she’d find peace. Now that she’s done so, it’s hard to imagine she doesn’t have something far more sinister in mind.
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