American Sweatshop

I stumbled across the trailer for this film on X (Twitter) and decided to watch it despite the low ratings — because I’ve learned that quite often my opinion differs from the general audience’s, and this film is no exception.

First of all, it was really nice to see Lili Reinhart, and she performed pretty well! The film reminded me of Promising Young Woman — and if that one didn’t make the men suffer enough for my taste, this one made up for it! I also really liked the range of topics it tackles, and there are quite a few.

The main one is violence — how common it is and how normalised violence, especially against women has become. Most of the videos discussed in the film involve men doing something to women, including the central trigger of the plot, and how everyone automatically assumes it was consensual or fake.

There’s also the issue of corporate double standards — where killing an animal is against the rules, but cooking it afterwards is fine. It perfectly illustrates how companies prefer to ignore responsibility and keep making money rather than actually do anything. And then there’s the reality of low-paid, gruelling work — not to mention the fact that if you collapse at your workplace from overwork, you still can’t afford the hospital bill.

Another major topic is law enforcement that simply doesn’t want to do its job — operating on the principle of “come back when something has actually happened.” No one wants to take on extra work to check out a potential threat, even when the evidence on screen makes it far from potential. In my opinion, that’s exactly why evil continues to spread. As a society we don’t prevent it, we don’t stop it from growing — we only deal with things after the fact, because it’s easier for everyone. Except the victims. Victims are never the priority.

Then there’s the willingness of people to witness evil and do absolutely nothing — not report it, not try to stop it, or worse, actively support it. The level of indifference and lack of compassion is one of society’s biggest problems, especially among men. As Maia Schwartz said: “Menstruation is the only blood that is not born from violence, yet it’s the one that disgusts you the most”.

The feeling of helplessness can consume you. And the desire to actually change something — when legal options fail — can push you toward the only thing that seems guaranteed to work: physical impact. Violence meeting violence. As the main character says:

— Bad things happen no matter what. And sometimes the only way to stop a bad thing is with another bad thing.

Maybe, in the end, kindness sometimes needs fists to protect the innocent and prevent bad things from happening.