The nastiest parts of the web are the focus of the new film American Sweatshop. It’s got one of the most unsettling, distressing, and downright scariest scenes of the year—and it’s not a horror movie. It’s the kind of movie that makes doomscrolling look like a cutesy and joyous exercise.
Riverdale alum Lili Reinhart stars in American Sweatshop as Daisy, who aspired to be a nurse, but her dreams never came to fruition. Instead, she works as what might be the single most unenviable job in America; a content moderator.
Daisy spends her days watching hours upon hours of content that has been reported by people online. It could be a racist rant, a brutal beheading, pornography, explicit violence, the list goes on…in order to decide if the content should be deleted.
Someone has to make a judgment call, and that someone is Daisy.
Part of the job involves becoming desensitized to certain kinds of gruesome content; she’s barraged by an endless glut of disgusting and offensive images. While working, she’s surrounded by dozens of people doing the same thing. Thousands of hours of footage are being absorbed through the eyes of these people, all attempting to make the internet a safer place.
But everyone has a breaking point. In Daisy’s office, her colleagues have an ongoing bet where they put money on who’s going to throw up next. It’s so commonplace that when someone almost pukes, Daisy curtly reminds them to vomit into a receptacle because they charge for cleaning.
Daisy’s a seasoned veteran in the moderation game, but one day, she finds a video that she just can’t shake.
Director Uta Briesewitz implements a wide array of closeups, both of Reinhart’s face and the computer screen. In the pivotal scene, Daisy is hard at work, deleting various problematic videos. We hear what Daisy hears through her headphones. Sounds of gunshots, frightened shouting, and more flood our ears as we try to piece together what Daisy is seeing.
Suddenly, things slow down as Daisy comes across a video called “Nailed it.” Unfortunately, it’s not a clip from the charming Nicole Byer-hosted Netflix series. The camera darts between Daisy and the video, cutting back and forth in a disorienting fashion. We get a sense of what the footage contains, but we don’t see it in its entirety, only in fragments.
We come to understand that the video is of a woman lying asleep, naked on a mattress. Another man walks around her, holding a long, menacing nail. The sounds of the man’s shoes dragging along the floor take over Daisy’s ears, creating a nauseating feeling as the camera locks in on Daisy’s distressed eyes.
The rapid editing makes the tension borderline unbearable, almost enough to make you sick. Suddenly, we understand the meaning of the video’s title, as the man drives a nail through the sleeping woman, which wakes her up, forcing out a blood-curdling scream.
Reinhart is extraordinary in this scene. In her eyes, we feel Daisy’s increasing discomfort and anguish. You get the unshakable sense that nothing Daisy has seen before has affected her like this. Everyone has a breaking point, and through Reinhart’s terrified eyes, you understand that Daisy is currently experiencing hers.
Daisy’s disgust and horror are made extremely clear. Unable to take any more, Daisy collapses, fainting from an overwhelming burst of trauma that rocks her psyche. Even after she wakes in the hospital, the video burrows deeper into her mind, ultimately changing the trajectory of her life.
While it’s later revealed as a torture porn video—meaning the woman in the video wasn’t actually impaled by a nail—we have no idea whether the video is real in the moment. Briesewitz wisely homes in on specific details like the sound of the woman screaming and Reinhart’s terrified eyes while obscuring so much of the video that it forces us to imagine the worst possible scenario.
Forcing us to conjure up our own images of what Daisy is witnessing crafts send your mind racing, expecting the worst—just like what happens to Daisy.
There’s an existential element to American Sweatshop that makes it even more unsettling. If someone whose job is to look at unsettling and explicit content for eight hours a day can’t tell if the video is real, what hope is there for any of us? It’s getting harder and harder to see things at face value. It’s harder to believe and more difficult to trust than ever before. Now that’s the kind of thing that keeps you up at night.
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