Grind (Grimmfest 2026)(II)

The world isn’t short of sources of horror at the moment, but there is a particular dread that creeps over people of my loose age group – older millennial, raised on Gen X culture, able to remember a world before the internet – whenever someone talks about “hacking” their personality. The sheer dehumanising force of surveillance capitalism, a force which affects everyone from the workers pissing in bottles in their warehouses to the consumers referring to their own self as a “curated brand”, is only an inch away from the nightmares of 20th century dystopian fiction, so why not make a horror movie about it? The obvious answer is that it’s near enough a horror movie anyway, but that hasn’t stopped Brea Grant, Ed Dougherty and Chelsea Stardust from taking an impressive tilt at it with their anthology film Grind, which recently screened at Grimmfest as part of a successful festival run.

Stardust, arguably the biggest name behind the camera thanks to 2019’s Satanic Panic, handles the wraparound in which a pair of the aforementioned bottle-micturating warehouse workers find themselves relegated to dealing with a parcel looming and dark enough to recall the 2001 monolith. They’re working for a fictional e-commerce giant called DRGN (pronounced “dragon”), which is roughly analogous to Amazon although it seems to have its tendrils in pretty much everything. Indeed, one of the biggest strengths of Grind is that it creates a completely convincing parallel universe of fictional brands and websites that thread in and out of the various stories. (I was particularly amused by the pointlessly gendered microwave meal company Stuff Dudes Eat, which is a background detail in two of the segments) It’s strange to me that – other than Boots Riley – no-one else seems to be doing this at the moment. Literally everything is copyrighted, so why not have some fun getting around that?

The first two segments, MLM and Delivery, are directed by Grant, while the last two, Content Moderator and Union Meeting, were helmed by Doughtery. All the segments, including the ones directed by Stardust, are co-written by Grant and Doughtery, which is one reason why the film is so consistent – in tone, in style, in background gags. It was a genuine surprise to find that the directors worked with several different directors of photography, because the film’s visuals are also remarkably even. It’s a strikingly polished film for something made on a low budget, although “polish” means something slightly different in each segment. The creature effects and action scenes of Union Meeting are as impressive in their own way as the surreal visuals and dense montages of Content Moderator, while Grant’s segments are particularly effective in capturing the constant pinging alerts and messages of online life becoming enmeshed in reality.

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It’s a feeling most people can probably relate to, and the unique subject matter of each short is always similarly easy to connect with. All of them are, in some way, about working-stiff anxiety. The title character of Content Moderator is tasked with approving or disapproving an endless stream of home-made pornography and gore videos at the expense of his sanity, while the heroine of MLM suffers a series of surreal penalties for failing to contribute to a pyramid scheme (run by genre icon Barbara Crampton). The starkest and finest metaphor comes in Delivery, a time-loop story in which a courier played by Vinny Thomas is repeatedly killed and respawned as he tries to make an impossible drop-off. It captures something of the sheer dispensability of the ordinary worker in the modern age. You can literally kill yourself making the delivery and management will never notice until it’s time to give you the next errand.

Having given Grind deserved praise for its consistency, it’s worth noting that the segments aren’t perfectly matched in quality. MLM features a great central double-act in the form of Jessika Van and sometime Jackass star Courtney Pauruso, but its stressed-out energy is maybe a little too full-on for the first short. It feels like the kind of short anthologies usually save for an extra shot of adrenalin in the final stage, and presumably the only reason why it isn’t positioned there is because Grind already has Content Moderator to fill that slot. Perhaps the best – certainly the most transgressive – film in the set, it has an extended cameo for the great James Urbaniak, an exhausting-looking lead role for Christopher Rodriguez Marquette, and a very funny supporting part for Rob Huebel as his unbearable boss, pontificating about how “sitting is the new cancer” in front of his vintage Polybius arcade machine. The real star, though, is the astonishingly dense and fast montages of appalling clips Marquette’s character has to sift through, which the end credits reveal as the work of four separate “Horrible Videos” units. No wonder.

Following this marathon of depravity, it’s perhaps inevitable that Union Meeting and the final wraparound segment represent a slight falling-off. They nevertheless work well as closing statements, and Union Meeting gives a good unlikely-hero’s arc to Dropout star Ify Nwadiwe. The cast is uniformly excellent, whether it’s recognisable faces like Crampton, Urbaniak or Jon Gabrus or newcomers like Thomas, who only seems to have notched up one preceding film credit before being flung into the maelstrom of Delivery‘s lead role. It’s the kind of film where even the tiniest parts are cast with someone who seems born to play the role, and on that note I’d like to congratulate Thor Harris, who is credited as “Frightening Man” in Delivery. He had one job, and he understood it perfectly.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – GRIND (2026)