The Mill, which began streaming on Hulu today, may not be the most subtle example of corporate horror, but it sure will hit close to home for any employee tasked with an impossible, stock-driven quota. Nothing says “late-stage capitalism has reached a breaking point” like the recent rise of horror movies and TV about white-collar work!
Directed by Sean King O’Grady, and written by Jeffrey David Thomas, The Mill stars Lil Rel Howery as a corporate employee named Joe, who wakes up in a prison cell. Horror fans know Howery best as the comic relief in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but here, Howery is deadly serious as a man trying to survive. The plot is straight-forward: Joe, an employee at a fictional corporation called Mallard, let his work performance slip. His wife is expecting their first child, so he took advantage of those so-called “unlimited” personal days that his company claims is a major perk. But Joe broke the unspoken rule of putting his own life before work. And now, Mallard intends to punish him.
The disembodied, Siri-esque computer voice informs Joe that he is in now in “career training.” His new work day is 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. His new work? To push the giant mill in the middle of his cell. He must meet the quota for the minimum number of revolutions each day, or he will be “terminated.” (Read: killed.) But wait, there’s more—whichever employee in the prison has the lowest number of revolutions at the end of the day will also be terminated, whether or not they have met their quota. In other words, the bare minimum is not enough. Mallard pits its employees against each other in such a way that the highest achiever screws over the rest of the workers. It’s pretty much corporate capitalism 101.
At first, Joe doesn’t get it. He’s an exemplary worker, and he always has been. On Day 1, he doubles his quota of 50 revolutions. Then he triples it. Then, in a fit of despair that he channels into work, he pushes himself to surpass over 300 revolutions. His reward for all his hard work? Mallard raises his quota. Of course they do! Now that the company knows it’s technically possible for Joe to do that many revolutions, they expect that output every day. Never mind that it’s impossible to sustain. To Mallard, Joe is not a human being. He’s just a number on a wall.
The Mill script is a tad clunky with its hit-you-over-the-head obvious metaphors. It’s never explained what Mallard, the company, actually does, because it doesn’t matter. Mallard, like all corporations, is in the money-making business. Uber-rich CEOs don’t care about goods and services—they care about inflating their numbers to look good for Wall Street investors. At one point, the computer voice explicitly explains to Joe that his output is important because it affects the Mallard stock. Viewers don’t need to connect the dots, because The Mill does it for them. And it’s certainly not as visually interesting or creative as Severance, the Apple TV corporate horror series that The Mill clearly tries to emulate.
But what the film lacks in subtly it makes up for in relatability. Gen X and millennials grew up believing—like Joe—that hard work would pay off, eventually. But as the wealth gap widens and algorithms take over the workforce, the American dream is slipping away. More and more people are forced to come to the same realization as Joe: the reward is not coming. Help is not coming. The quota is never going down. Isn’t that horrifying?