The evils of late-stage capitalism have been addressed at every film festival ever in recent years, but hardly ever in the midnight strand. This ingenious horror-comedy anthology achieves the almost unthinkable; while it delivers the requisite laughs and shocks — never an easy balance to strike, even at the best of times — Grind is just as effective in its jabs at the gig economy as anything by Britain’s Ken Loach or any other director from the school of social realism. There are echoes of Boots Riley’s 2018 Sundance breakout Sorry to Bother You, but Grind is a little more ambitious than that in its outlook — there’s even plenty of scope for a sequel or two here, pegged to the motives of the sinister DRGN Corporation, which looms in the background throughout.
Unusually for an anthology movie, Grind has a very fluid structure, using its premise as a linking device rather than a theme, breaking things up into disparate chapters. The latter has worked well enough for the likes of V/H/S and The ABCs of Death, but the danger in multiple-director movies is that there’s always an episode that doesn’t work as well as the others. Though Grind also hits the occasional bump, the structure is built to absorb it, creating a believable world, with recurring characters and in-jokes (such as a print magazine called Modem Monthly) that keep the wildly divergent plot on track.
Taking shots at Amazon, Facebook, Starbucks, DoorDash and the many other faces of the corporate hydra, Grind begins in a warehouse, where Maria (Mercedes Mason) is behind on her schedule after failing to find a ringlight in the lamp section (she should be looking under “influencer supplies”). It’s her third strike, which is bad news. Maria wonders if her pay will be docked, but it’s worse than that — as her workmate Pete (Mike Mercer) explains, “When you’ve displeased the DRGN, the DRGN sends you a box.” But what’s in the box? It’s a mystery the film quite admirably sustains.
Immediately, the film segues into the story of Sarah (Jessika Van), who has recently signed up as a rep for Lala Leggings, a company that outsources the online sale of Lycra jogging pants. Sweating profusely in front of her computer (and a ringlight), Sarah fails horribly in her mission to meet her first target. As Maria found out in the first segment, there is a price to pay for this, the first being that her husband’s penis will turn into a scrub jay, a little blue bird. Since Sarah hasn’t bothered watching any of the training videos, she is ill-prepared for any further penalties, which escalate to the point when the barely human Ax Man shows up in his spangly top and unicorn jeggings.
This tale folds into the story of Benny (Vinny Thomas) who works for DRGNDash, running all over town for chump change, even picking up food orders as small as a cup of coffee in a hipster hangout (“I’m standing in line for a dollar profit,” he complains). Benny’s fortunes seem to change when customer Simon S. (true, not very subtle) sends him to an ominously nondescript office in a remote industrial area. Inside is a gothic nightmare that Benny describes as “John Wayne Gacy’s mancave”, a reference to the notorious killer clown, and the takeaway order he has to take away is dripping with ooze. But every time Benny refuses, the scenario resets (a very funny spoof of the recent time loop craze) and Simon ups the cash, which Benny can’t resist.
The next section is the darkest, with former teacher Joel (Christopher Marquette) joining DRGN Corp. as part of their Hatchbook service, a white-collar tech-bro set up that seems too good to be true, with free food, health insurance and a paycheck amounting to $175k a year. There’s only one catch: First, Joel must spend time in The Pit, watching submitted video files, all 6,250,00 of them. So, Joel gets his own cubicle, spending hour after hour watching the most obscene images known to man (which the film manages to convey without ever becoming too graphic).
This sequence dovetails nicely with the final storyline, which sees the staff of the DRGN-owned coffee chain Neptulia — the franchise first referenced in Benny’s story — getting unionized and acting out against The Man, a serious defense of solidarity that can’t help tongue-in-cheek references to the sometimes-cartoonish excesses of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion et al.
It all wraps up in a very entertaining coda that, while mocking the apparent faceless cruelty of big companies, actually puts some faces to that facelessness — horror staple Barbara Crampton as the founder of Lala Leggings and Rob Huebel as her husband, the outreach liaison at DRGN Corp. It’s a funny inversion of the old saying that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. Grind says that the opposite is true, that the only thing necessary is for bad people to walk all over everybody else, and as long as we let them get away with it, it will happen again and again.
Title: Grind
Festival: SXSW (Narrative Feature Competition)
Directors: Brea Grant, Ed Dougherty, Chelsea Stardust
Screenwriters: Brea Grant, Ed Dougherty
Cast: Barbara Crampton, Rob Huebel, Christopher Marquette, Jessika Van, Vinny Thomas, Mercedes Mason, Mike Mercer, Aubrey Shea
Sales: Yellow Veil Pictures
Running time: 1 hr 44 mins
