Curator Watchlist
A timely internet-thriller with a strong central performance and a grimly relatable premise, but the execution sounds uneven and somewhat underpowered compared with sharper recent films in the same lane. It seems more effective as an anxiety piece about moderation, surveillance, and moral burnout than as a fully… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 1h 33m
Director: Uta Briesewitz
Starring: Lili Reinhart, Daniela Melchior, Jeremy Ang Jones
A content moderator is tasked with purging offensive media from the internet. When she witnesses a crime in a video, she is lured away from the safety of her keyboard as she obsessively seeks to hold someone accountable.
Uta Briesewitz
Lili Reinhart, Daniela Melchior, Jeremy Ang Jones
A timely internet-thriller with a strong central performance and a grimly relatable premise, but the execution sounds uneven and somewhat underpowered compared with sharper recent films in the same lane. It seems more effective as an anxiety piece about moderation, surveillance, and moral burnout than as a fully satisfying mystery.
American Sweatshop has a premise that feels ripped from the worst corners of modern life: a job built around absorbing other people’s cruelty, then one video that breaks the routine and turns private dread into obsession. The setup is strong, and the film clearly understands how online labor can corrode the self. Lili Reinhart appears to be the anchor, giving the story enough human pain to keep it from becoming purely conceptual.
What holds it back is that the material sounds more familiar than fearless. The reviews suggest the movie hits recognizable notes about social media, surveillance, and the numbness of constant exposure, but doesn’t always push those ideas into something sharper or more unsettling. For some viewers, that will still be enough, especially if the mood and the lead performance land.
As a thriller, it looks modest rather than explosive. As a portrait of digital-era exhaustion, it seems more successful, especially for anyone who has ever felt the psychic damage of endless feeds, moderation queues, and the sense that the internet is quietly deforming everyone who works inside it.
aaron (3.5★) · 866 likes
running home from work to hug your dog and cry … i feel seen
hugeasmammoth (3★) · 809 likes
She should have taken out the dark Betty bob.
reagandance (3.5★) · 777 likes
what actually scares me the most is a 9 year old having a reddit account
theo (2★) · 534 likes
mcdonald’s weren’t hiring ??
Kit Lazer (2.5★) · 452 likes
I think it’s important that film is exploring this topic more and more often. The impact of social media on our culture, surveillance, the way online spaces are morphing our collective psyche, all of these things need to be discussed constantly. Lili Reinhart is great, truly, it’s just that once you’ve seen Red Rooms this movie feels so trite.
A far sharper and colder descent into online violence, voyeurism, and fixation, with a similarly unsettling digital-age premise.
Uses the internet as both setting and threat, turning screen life into a pressure cooker of dread and social cruelty.
Explores identity, online labor, and the psychological cost of being trapped inside a platform-driven persona.
A tech-mediated mystery that makes screens, feeds, and digital traces feel like the whole world.
A slick, contemporary thriller built around online investigation and the anxiety of trying to find truth through platforms.
Shares the investigative obsession and grim interest in violence, corruption, and damaged protagonists.
For viewers who like procedural obsession curdling into personal fixation and moral exhaustion.
An early, influential paranoia thriller about identity, systems, and the vulnerability of life lived through screens.
A propulsive surveillance thriller that turns modern systems into a source of constant pressure and fear.
A classic study of surveillance, paranoia, and the psychological toll of listening too closely.
Not a theatrical film, so not included.
For its rigorous portrait of professional pressure, self-destruction, and the collapse of control.
internet violence, content moderation, obsession, surveillance, digital alienation, moral burnout, female-led thriller, trauma
psychological thriller, mystery, internet culture, surveillance, obsession, digital alienation, moral decay, contemporary drama, bleak tone, female protagonist