Daisy Moriarty (Lili Reinhart) has a truly horrible job. She spends her days moderating the worst of humanity on social media, reviewing videos flagged for potential violations of the company’s admittedly vague guidelines, which often prioritize clicks over the offended party or even human decency. You know all the horrible things you regret seeing on Al Gore’s internet? Imagine having to watch variations on them all day, every day. It’s no wonder that they have a therapist on staff, a comfort room for moderators, and a pool going about when the new guy will crack. It sounds awful, but it also sounds like a great starting point for a modern riff on “The Conversation” or “Blow Out,” stories of surveillance basically driving people mad. You know what they say about looking into the abyss.
The problem is that Uta Briesewitz’s “American Sweatshop” doesn’t quite have the courage to really follow through on its ambitious and timely concept. When it flirts with the impact of all this true darkness on both the world and the individual, such as in a captivating tangent in which a moderator watches something horrible (but unseen by us, thankfully) happening to a dog and then rushes home to hug his own pup, Matthew Nemeth’s script shows its teeth, but it never really bites. It’s too content to exist as a thriller/mystery instead of a commentary, never successfully marrying the two, despite Reinhart’s best efforts.
The “Riverdale” star is legitimately great as a woman who seems to be using this awful day job as a way to bridge chapters in her life. Daisy wants to become a nurse eventually, but that goal becomes further out of reach when she literally faints after watching a video awaiting moderation, and the bill for the ambulance makes her finances even tighter. Again, there’s an unpopped kernel of an idea here in that the awful corners of the internet are trapping everyone, the people in charge of it included, into immobility, forcing them to repeat the same procedures day in and day out, whether it’s Daisy’s job or your doomscrolling.
Daisy is rattled out of her numbing stasis when she sees the video that drops her. Briesewitz smartly doesn’t show much of the questionable content in her film, cutting in flashes of images and letting sound design fill in the gaps. In this one, Daisy sees a woman screaming on what appears to be a table. There’s a nail involved. Is it real? Daisy’s boss and even the authorities are certain that it’s probably not, but she remains unconvinced, using the internet to try to track down the creator and bring him to justice.
Looking for answers in a world that increasingly seems like it refuses to provide concrete ones regarding what’s real or what matters online is, again, a great starting point for a thriller, but “American Sweatshop” is often as frustrating as a TikTok video that brings up an idea for clicks instead of having anything to say about it. It leaves Reinhart to do all of the heavy lifting in terms of theme and character, which she does respectably. As often as this film frustrated me regarding Nemeth’s shallow script, I was impressed by the choices made by Reinhart, who plays Daisy’s numbness not as apathy, but something fueled by frustration and anger. She becomes convinced that solving the mystery of the “Nailed It” video is the only way to make her whole again, and I only wish that the film around her trusted its leading lady to go to the truly dark places this story suggests. She’s up for the challenge, giving Daisy an icy unpredictability that’s captivating. She’s got something to say, even if the movie around her too often sounds like a whisper when so many of us are screaming.
