There is a certain kind of job that most of us try not to think about. Someone has to stare into the worst corners of the internet and decide what stays and what goes. That is Daisy Moriarty’s reality. She sits in a windowless space watching videos that other people flagged, trying to figure out if they violate a set of rules that seem to bend with the wind. The guidelines read like a puzzle and the company seems more worried about engagement than decency. There is a staff therapist, a quiet room for any sudden breakdowns, and even a betting pool for when the new hire will finally fold. You can feel the dread before the opening scene is over.
It is an idea with teeth. The modern internet has turned surveillance into a way of life. Not just cameras on every corner, but also eyeballs on every feed, every hour of the day. Think of the mood that floats through The Conversation or Blow Out. Those classics sit with obsession and paranoia until the walls close in. American Sweatshop sets up a related tension in our time. A woman who watches the stuff we all wish we could unsee is slowly pushed toward an edge. You look into the abyss long enough and it looks back. We have all heard that line. Here, it is not just a quote on a coffee mug. It is someone’s time clock.
So this premise could carry a thrilling, angry commentary about what the internet asks of the people who clean it up. It could also chase a mystery. That balance is hard to achieve and the film does try to walk that tightrope. It wants grit and suspense. It wants to say something about platforms that prefer clicks to conscience. It wants the tension of a mystery with the weight of an essay. It wants both.
The director Uta Briesewitz seems to know that the most frightening images are the ones our minds finish for us. There are only brief flashes of the awful videos that pass through Daisy’s screen. Fragments of sound do most of the work and then the cuts come hard. Your brain fills in the rest. It is a smart choice and it spares the audience while letting the horror sit right beneath the surface. One of the strongest passages follows a moderator who watches something terrible happen to a dog. We do not see the act. We see the aftermath in a different form. He goes home and hugs his pup like he just picked the animal up from a burning building. In moments like that the script by Matthew Nemeth starts to show the story it could be. You feel the anger and the sadness. You feel a movie growing claws. And then it lets go.
The disappointment in American Sweatshop is not that it aims small. It is that it does not follow the aim all the way to the target. When the film leans into the mental toll of this work it grips you. It knows there is a cost to curating the internet. It even knows that the platforms themselves keep everyone locked in the same loops. Employees clock in. Users doomscroll. People keep doing the same motions every day while telling themselves that they will stop tomorrow. That is a chilling truth. But the film repeatedly retreats to safer ground. It keeps choosing to be a tidy thriller when the more interesting, tougher path would be to wrestle with the mess in plain view.
The lead performance tries to carry that heavier version anyway. Lili Reinhart is terrific. She plays Daisy as someone in limbo, using this awful day job to cover the gap between chapters in her life. She wants to become a nurse. It feels like a real dream, a life with purpose and maybe a softer light at the edges. Then she watches a particular video and collapses. She faints right there at work. The ambulance bill that follows squeezes her finances even tighter. Suddenly that exit plan looks like a hallway with no end. It is a cruel loop that many people will recognize. The internet keeps people stuck. It is not only the viewers trapped in their feeds. It is also the workers who keep the system running.
You can see this theme in the way Daisy moves through scenes. Reinhart never lets her devolve into apathy. The numbness reads as suppressed heat. She carries frustration under the skin. There is anger behind her eyes, and a tired patience in her voice, like she has explained herself one too many times. It is a small miracle of tone. She never overplays it. She never winks. She simply lets the grind accumulate and turn into pressure.
The video that drops Daisy changes everything. In it there is a woman on a table, screaming. There is the suggestion of a nail. The images flicker. The sound grows thick. Is it a staged thing or a real crime caught on a lens and routed through a thousand hands for clicks. Her boss believes it is fake. The authorities say the same. They shrug, they nod, they move on. Daisy cannot. She goes searching for the original source. She chases the upload trail the way a detective follows a footprint in wet earth. She wants to find whoever did this. She wants it to matter to somebody other than her.
Again, it is a strong setup. In a time when everything is content and nothing is real, the hunt for a definite truth feels both noble and foolish. You want Daisy to be right. You want someone in a position of power to admit that the distinction between real harm and viral gimmick is not a side issue. It is the entire moral core of this ecosystem. The film circles that question a lot. And then it often drifts away from it. There are stretches that feel like a teaser reel for a harder story that never gets made. It reminds me of those viral clips that deliver a hot idea in twenty seconds and then never follow through. You are left with a hook but not a song.
Even so, Reinhart continues to give a layered and compelling turn. She takes the weight of the themes the script will not pick up and carries it herself. She builds a character out of micro choices. The way Daisy stares at the monitor when she thinks no one is looking. The way she holds her breath before she hits play. The way her hands shake so slightly you wonder if she can feel it. She treats numbness as a protective response rather than a lack of caring. It is clear she is trying not to break apart. The tension comes from watching that shield start to crack.
What I kept wishing for was a bolder commitment from the film around her. Daisy is ready to go to dark places. The performance signals that she is capable of crossing a line if that is what it takes to find the truth. The direction and the writing rarely allow her to push that far. They keep steering her back toward tidy beats. You can sense a version of this story where Daisy’s pursuit becomes truly dangerous, psychologically and physically, not just tense. That version lives between the frames. We get glimpses of it. The movie, however, tends to retreat to a whisper when the moment calls for a full voice.
There is still craft to admire. The choice to avoid gratuitous gore is the right one. Letting sound design carry the burden is both humane and effective. It respects the audience and also mirrors how these videos live in the minds of the people who view them for a living. You cannot unhear certain things. Quick cuts and flashes stand in for the unspeakable and that restraint builds a different kind of fear. It is not shock value. It is dread.
The workplace details feel grounded too. The presence of a therapist on staff says a lot without anyone saying anything. The comfort room might as well be a first aid kit for the soul. That betting pool about the new guy sounds cruel until you realize it is a coping mechanism. This is how people survive work that should probably not exist in this form. The company rules are written in such a fog that one can almost hear the legal department muttering behind them. We do not offend. We do not admit fault. We do not lose clicks. The message is not subtle.
Where American Sweatshop falters is in the marriage between the pulse of a thriller and the bite of a critique. The two halves keep jostling for space. The plot wants to be a chase. The commentary wants to dig its heels in and argue. Because the film never picks a lane, neither piece fully lands. It is possible to do both. It just takes a clear sense of how the chase illuminates the argument and vice versa. Here, that connection flickers in and out.
There is a telling passage where the movie touches on the internet’s habit of turning cruelty into content. The point lands. Then the scene shifts back to the mechanics of the investigation, and the energy drops. The transitions start to feel like quick channel flips. You want a crescendo and get a pause.
Still, I do not want to undersell how much Reinhart’s work elevates what is on the page. She gives Daisy a cool unpredictability. There are beats where she feels as if she might do something impulsive, even reckless, and you lean forward. Those are the moments when the film threatens to become the thing it promises. A prickly, haunted study of someone who knows too much about what the world chooses to watch. I wish we had more of them.
There is also a potent idea inside the subplot about money. The ambulance bill tightening the vise is not just a throwaway beat. It underscores how structural pressures keep people in place. If the film had returned to that thread more often, it might have found an even sharper ache. Health costs, debts, thin margins. All of that turns a bad job into an unavoidable one. It makes the treadmill feel endless.
Another undercurrent the film brushes against is the way institutions shrug. Daisy’s boss and the authorities do not want to declare anything too quickly. On the surface that looks like caution. It is also a way to look past responsibility. If everything is probably fake until proven otherwise, you never have to admit that something real and terrible was allowed to spread through a platform you control. That question should burn a hole in the room. The story, however, tends to file it under background noise.
To be fair, some of this vagueness is the point. The web is an echo chamber of contradictions. A million views can mean a million different things. Someone can tell you nothing matters while nudging you to keep watching. The truth hides behind edits, filters, and algorithms that no one outside the building understands. That ambiguity could have been mined for rich drama. It ends up feeling like fog the characters wander through rather than a tool the movie weaves into a larger thesis.
How does it stack up next to the older films it evokes. The Conversation and Blow Out are not just about surveillance. They are about the way obsession remakes a person from the inside. Each choice carries a cost. Each discovery tightens the trap. In American Sweatshop, Daisy begins down that path but the world around her will not commit to pushing her all the way. The story wants the chill of obsession without the consequence. As a result the ending beats hit softer than they could.
None of this means the film is empty. It is not. If anything, it is frustrating because it clearly has something to say. You can feel the intent. You can feel the anger at systems that ask people to look away in order to keep the wheel spinning. You can feel the compassion for the workers who cannot just log off. The energy is there. It just does not fully crystallize.
I kept thinking about the moderators of the real world whose days are measured in minutes spent staring at materials the rest of us are spared. They go home and have dinner. They try not to bring the day inside. But some images never leave. A movie about that experience that is willing to show how it unravels a person slowly and then all at once would be unforgettable. This one comes close to opening that door. It does not walk through.
And then there is the title that Daisy gives the mystery at the center. Nailed It. It is a grim joke, a viral friendly phrase laid over something that might be a crime. It speaks volumes about the way everything is packaged online. Even pain gets a catchy label. The movie gets this. It lets that irony hang in the air. I only wish it pushed harder on the cost of that casual gloss.
When the credits roll you remember two things most. The texture of the world and the face of the woman stuck inside it. The workplace feels precise. The screens glow just a bit too bright. The quiet room looks too clean. The headphones are always within reach. And Daisy, with her simmering focus, stays with you. She is a person trying to make herself whole in a place designed to grind people down, and Reinhart makes that conflict vivid.
If American Sweatshop had trusted its lead to pull the whole story into the darker places she seems ready to explore, the film could have been something fierce. As it stands, it is a competent thriller with flashes of insight, built on a terrific performance, that keeps glancing at the larger argument and then looking away. It whispers when you expect it to shout. That whisper is not nothing. It carries sadness and a little rage. You can hear what the movie wants to say about the cost of looking. You can hear it, even as you wish it would finally, fully speak.
Maybe that is fitting. The internet buzzes at a constant volume. People are always shouting. A whisper can get lost. Or it can cut through when you lean in. American Sweatshop asks us to lean in. It just needs to raise its own voice a little more.
