An online content moderator deletes a suicide video made by her co-worker. But the otherwise desensitized woman cannot escape from either her own troubled past or from a mysterious vengeful presence.
Grimmfest Says: Who watches the Watchmen? It’s a question genre fans often ask when confronted by some particularly sanctimonious pronouncement from a certification / censorship board: if you truly consider exposure to such material harmful, then what is watching so much of it doing to you? Surely nothing good. In the wake of Prano Bailey-Bond’s CENSOR, and its eerily on-point evocation of the era of the Video Nasty, Mikhail Red offers an equally chilling examination of the censor’s role in the age of the internet. A harrowing portrait of a beleaguered content moderator, continually bombarded by disturbing and distressing imagery, exhausted by brutally long hours and working in the service of a manipulative, sexually predatory, and morally compromised boss, it starts out as a slow-burning, sulphurous study of a the damage done by a truly toxic workplace environment, a gripping psychological thriller about a damaged, emotionally repressed young woman being pushed ever closer to mental meltdown. But then as the film progresses, and the protagonist starts to come increasingly unravelled, haunted by repressed memories and her guilt over her co-worker’s suicide, reality starts to become slightly… slippery… Is she really being stalked by a vengeful spirit straight of a J-Horror ghost story, or is it all in her head, a manifestation of her own troubled conscience? Anchored by Nadine Lustre’s complex, carefully nuanced, utterly committed lead performance, the film expertly plays the psychological off against the supernatural, building towards a truly chilling, emotional gut-punch of a climax.