One psychological thriller is blowing up on HBOMax‘s US streaming chart, but this movie is not for the faint of heart. The murky world of content moderation has become a cultural fascination in recent years, as an increasingly large audience has started to wonder what it must be like to filter the most explicit and shocking content out of social media platforms for a living. 2026’s Faces of Death reboot cleverly utilised this subject in its story of a content moderator who becomes obsessed with a series of violent videos that may or may not contain real murders.
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However, before this reboot came along, 2025’s critical hit American Sweatshop had already seen director Uta Briesewitz explore similar themes. After a quiet release in September 2025, this acclaimed psychological thriller jumped to the top of HBOMax’s most-watched streaming movies in April 2026. However, prospective viewers should be warned that the thriller is not for the faint of heart. American Sweatshop stars Riverdale‘s Lili Reinhart as Daisy, a desensitised content moderator who finds a particular video so disturbing that she feels compelled to track down its creator.
American Sweatshop Is A Dark Psychological Thriller About Content Moderation
Although the plot of American Sweatshop sounds very similar to the story of the Faces of Death reboot, the two movies execute these plots very differently. Where the reboot of Faces of Death is a full-blown slasher, complete with a masked killer and numerous elaborate set-piece kills, American Sweatshop is more of a character study and an ensemble piece that doesn’t just focus on one content moderator.
Instead, American Sweatshop jumps around between the movie’s content moderators to explore how their work impacts each of them in unique, although universally negative, ways. One of Daisy’s coworkers frequently has breakdowns at work and loudly decries the nature of the job, while a more recent hire tries to keep his head down and get through the day but finds himself overwhelmed by the atrocities he witnesses on his shifts. All the while, Lili Reinhart’s burnt-out industry veteran becomes more and more obsessed with tracking down the elusive creator of one appalling video.
American Sweatshop’s Timely Story Made The Thriller A Streaming Success
In the same week that Faces of Death’s similar reboot came out in theaters, American Sweatshop proved a huge success on streaming. This proves just how much the phenomenon of content moderation has captured the cultural imagination in recent years, as further evidenced by the popularity of authors Hanna Bervoets and Elaine Castillo’s two 2025 novels, We Had To Remove This Post and Moderation. Both books, like American Sweatshop, center on the human cost of this insurmountable task.
While Faces of Death’s reboot might take a gorier, more horror-centric approach to this story, American Sweatshop’s character study is just as disquieting in its own way. Like a lot of classic psychological thrillers, from American Psycho to Nightcrawler, American Sweatshop keeps a surprising amount of its most shocking moments offscreen, relying on implication and sound design to shock viewers. In an era when shocking content is more accessible than ever, perhaps American Sweatshop is right to posit that sometimes, less is more.
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