Since the inception of the internet, we’ve been playing a severely mismatched game of catch-up. On one side: the World Wide Web, with its inherent atmosphere of unchecked permissiveness. On the other: lowly human beings who are stuck trying to figure out how to police (or whether to police at all) a lawless land where anything goes. American Sweatshop asks us to consider the irony of moderating content and violence when no amount of band-aids can cover a gushing wound.

Daisy (Lili Reinhart) is a 25-year-old headstrong yet aimless woman who works for the fictional Paladin Control, a content patrol company in Tallahᴀssee, Florida, whose sole function is to comb through the daily barrage of internet user-submitted complaints of videos, images, and comments. Daisy’s job — alongside a pool of other young, money-desperate employees — is to manually watch all manner of filth to decide whether the content is removable or not.

“The job is easy,” Ava (Christiane Paul), Daisy’s boss, ᴀsserts in a training meeting, “You sit at a computer. You peruse social media. Something you’d be doing all day anyway.” But what happens if the content you’re witnessing isn’t just excessively violent or inexplicably offensive but catastrophically illegal? Daisy faces this question head-on when, one day, she watches a film depicting something between BDSM and violent murder.

American Sweatshop Ultimately Cannot Live Up to Its Pulpy Promise

In her feature directorial debut, Uta Briesewitz sets up a powerful blend of social critique and workplace thriller that, in its use of quotidian clicks and clacks, immediately recalls the sonic horror of The ᴀssistant (2019). But, unlike Kitty Green’s post-#MeToo, post-Harvey Weinstein scourge against the casual misogyny of Hollywood, Briesewitz’s film very quickly loses its pulpy setup by, perhaps ironically, insisting on its shaky plot mechanics.

It’s when Daisy decides to take matters into her own hands that American Sweatshop unravels from its promise as a commentary on the internet’s intrinsic poison to a cat-and-mouse thriller that goes nowhere fast. Which, sure, is part of the point. Briesewitz and screenwriter Matthew Nemeth are less concerned with Daisy’s ability to find the torturers from her video than with dramatizing how violence begets violence, and how playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with human debauchery has more of a negative impact on the player than the mole.

That’s all well and good, but there seems to be no reason to explain why this particular video is so immediately disturbing to Daisy that she decides to go behind her boss’s back to the police and then, against their wishes, too. Former mainstay of Riverdale Lili Reinhart is exceptional and grounded in a role that requires a bubbling anger through a mask of stoicism, but she cannot cover up the plot contrivances endemic to the script.

Though Nemeth’s screenplay invokes Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), it has neither of those films’ core strength: to blend a critique of the human fetish for violence with an ace mystery box narrative. It has the former, but not the latter, and the whole thing falls apart.

It doesn’t help that the film never justifies why any of these characters would stay beholden to a job that, we learn, has no benefits and extremely low pay. Her coworker Bob (Joel Fry), clad in shirts that say things like “Gandhi Was a Racist”, is perpetually yelling, throwing, and breaking company equipment just to cope with the sheer amount of horror he sees every day, while Paul (Jeremy Ang Jones) is a new hire whose presence here belies an extremely impressive resume. The film never quite makes us understand why it’s worth deliberately traumatizing the mind for a few pennies.

What the film does exceedingly well is make us see the inherent irony of moderating online violence to the exclusion of the real-life violence in front of our faces. Daisy is reliant on marijuana, casual Sєx, and free meditations to become numb, all the while shielding herself from her own degradation into her use of violence. Briesewitz, whose past work includes the Black Mirror episode “Mazey Day,” and work on Marvel’s The Defenders, inserts an appreciable understanding of tech’s horrors and its cost on human integrity she has demonstrated in that past work.

Daisy understands why the company keeps hiring people in a job that one would ᴀssume would be among the first to go to AI. “Computers can’t feel grief,” Daisy tells Paul on a work break one day, “which is our only real job requirement, when you think about it. They’re paying us for our pain.” But if our pain is inured, our immunity to death and decay built up over time through excessive exposure, what is it really worth? And when faced with the choice between helping a stranger in need and our own self-serving sense of heroism, what do most people do? For Daisy, that question is haunting. One just wishes Briesewitz would make us feel that.