The evils of late-stage capitalism have been tackled at every film festival in recent years, but rarely at midnight. This brilliant horror-comedy achieves the almost unthinkable; while delivering the requisite laughs and shocks – never an easy hit, even at the best of times – Grind is as successful in the gig economy as anything by Britain’s Ken Loach or any other director of the social realist school. There are echoes of Boots Riley’s 2018 Sundance breakout Sorry to bother youbut Grind it’s more ambitious than that in its looks – there’s even a wide range of sequels or two here, hinted at the intentions of the nefarious DRGN Corporation, looming in the background throughout.
Unusual in an anthology movie, Grind it has a very fluid structure, using its premise as a linking device rather than a context, dividing things into separate chapters. The latter worked well enough for the likes of V/H/S again The ABCs of Deathbut the danger in the movies of many directors is that there is always an episode that doesn’t work as well as the others. However Grind and hits the occasional bump, the plot is built to absorb, creating a believable world, with recurring characters and comics (like a print magazine called Monthly modem) that keep a very different plan in motion.
Taking a shot at Amazon, Facebook, Starbucks, DoorDash and many other faces of the corporate hydra, Grinding begins in the warehouse, where Maria (Mercedes Mason) is behind her schedule after failing to find a bright light in the part of the lamp (she has to look under the “influencer’s goods”). It’s his third strike, which is bad news. Maria wonders if her salary will be frozen, but it’s worse than that – as co-worker Pete (Mike Mercer) explains, “When you don’t make DRGN happy, DRGN sends you a box.” But what’s in the box? It’s a mystery the film keeps admirably.
Soon, the film dives into the story of Sarah (Jessika Van), who has just been signed up as a representative for Lala Leggings, a company that offers online sales of Lycra running pants. Sweating profusely in front of her computer (and a flashlight), Sarah fails miserably in her quest to achieve her first goal. As Maria finds out in the first episode, there is a price to pay for this, firstly that her husband’s penis will turn into a scrub jay, a small blue bird. Since Sarah hasn’t bothered to watch any training videos, she’s not ready to receive any more punishments, which escalate to the point where the ax man is only seen in a spangly top and unicorn jeggings.
The story follows Benny (Vinny Thomas) who works for DRGNDash, running across town to change chumps, taking food orders as small as a cup of coffee at a hipster hangout (“I’m standing in line dollar profit,” he complains). Benny’s fortunes seem to change when a client Simon S. (the real one, not so subtle) sends him to a dangerously sinister office in a remote industrial area. Inside is a nightmare that Benny describes as “John Wayne Gacy’s mancave”, a reference to the clown of a well-known killer, and the takeover refuses. to reset the situation (the funniest spoof of the latest loop craze) and Simon raises money, Benny can’t resist it.
The next section is very dark, when former teacher Joel (Christopher Marquette) joins the DRGN Corp. as part of their Hatchbook service, a white tech-bro setup that seems too good to be true, with free meals, health insurance and a salary of up to $175k a year. There is one catch: First, Joel must spend time in The Pit, watching the video files submitted, all of which are 6,250,00. So, Joel gets himself a cubicle, where he spends hour after hour watching the most hideous images known to man (a film that manages to express itself without being again image).
This sequence goes well with the last story, which sees the employees of DRGN of neptulia coffee owned by DRGN – the franchise that is mentioned for the first time in Benny’s story – unite and act against The Man, a strong defense of unity that cannot help the tongue-in-cheek references of Exttin Stop Rebe, sometimes cartoonish.
It all wraps up with a very entertaining coda that, while mocking the baseless brutality of big corporations, actually puts a face to that facelessness – the terrifying core of Barbara Crampton as the founder of Lala Leggings and Rob Huebel as her husband, an outreach coordinator at DRGN Corp. It’s a funny twist on the old word for people to do nothing good for people to do nothing. Grind it says the opposite is true, all it takes is for the bad guys to walk away from everyone, and as long as we let them get away with it, it will happen over and over again.
Title: Grind
Festival: SXSW (Narrative Feature Competition)
Directors: Brea Grant, Ed Dougherty, Chelsea Stardust
Screenwriters: Brea Grant, Ed Dougherty
Actors: Barbara Crampton, Rob Huebel, Christopher Marquette, Jessika Van, Vinny Thomas, Mercedes Mason, Mike Mercer, Aubrey Shea
Sales: Pictures of the Yellow Veil
Working time: 1 hour 44 minutes
