The Mill Director Discusses the Dystopic New Thriller From Hulu

Just in time for Halloween, the all-new horror film The Mill has been released on Hulu, which delivers audiences an entirely unexpected experience. The new movie comes from director Sean King O’Grady and stars Lil Rel Howery, offering up a nightmarish scenario in which a man is tasked with a physically punishing task, but if he doesn’t meet expectations, he could be putting his family and other mysterious captives in danger. Like many dystopic narratives, the less an audience knows, the better, though no matter how much you know about the story, you’ll still never predict the film’s twists and turns. The Mill is now streaming on Hulu.

Part of what makes the film so effective is the performance from star Howery, who is more known for his comedic efforts.

“Rel is obviously really well known for his comedies, but he’s also incredible in Get Out, and I had the fortunate experience of working with him. He was in a movie that I produced called I Love My Dad, and I was sitting there on set watching him act and watching the seriousness with which he approaches his comedy and just his craft in general, and it just snapped into my mind, ‘I really want to work with this guy in a drama,’” O’Grady shared with ComicBook.com about the casting decision. “Then when The Mill came around and I was reading the script, that was just a face I kept picturing. I kept thinking of Rel, and so we were super lucky. We sent him the script and he read it really quickly and got back to us and he wanted to do it and was excited about the challenge. It was just one of those situations, rare situations where there’s a guy you really want for the role and he wants to do it. It never happens, ever.”

Hulu describes the movie, “A businessman (Howery) wakes up beside an ancient grist mill situated in the center of an open-air prison cell with no idea how he got there. Forced to work as a beast of burden to stay alive, he must find a way to escape before the birth of his child.”

One of the more exciting opportunities, and challenges, was designing the wheel that the businessman must push, because it’s one thing to read about it in a script and it’s another to showcase a more tangible visual of the relic.

“There’s a lot of steps to getting there for sure. We were really lucky when we first started designing the set,” O’Grady shared of building the prop. “My production designer, Amy Williams, she was in Italy where there happened to still be some of these medieval gristmills at old farms and things. She was doing actual research on the ground and sending me photos of what some of these things looked like, and so it evolved.” 

He continued, “It actually became much more of an ancient-style gristmill than we had originally envisioned. I think we saw a modern version of a gristmill. Then, from that point on, it was about figuring out, ‘Okay, how much would this thing actually weigh?’ Obviously these are made to be pushed, but they’re made to be pushed by beasts of burden. What we ultimately landed on is: this is about the weight of a motorcycle and, take yourself, stand up a motorcycle, try to push a motorcycle across a parking lot. Not that hard for the first quarter mile. After you do it for a while, it’s really hard. We thought that was a pretty realistic weight to give to it.”

In addition to going into a dystopic story blindly, these are also worlds that have a lot of opportunities for expansion. O’Grady went on to address whether he sees more stories unfolding in this world.

“I want to have my cake and eat it, too, in that sense. I think that the movie does have a very definitive ending,” the director confirmed. “I think it needed one for the experience that you see Joe go through here, but I also think is this the end of stories within this particular world? Absolutely not.”

The Mill is out now on Hulu.

What did you think of the movie? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!