It sounds hyperbolic, but for most people, there hasn’t been a more relatable film than The Mill in years. The allegorical sci-fi thriller is as prescient and timely a reflection of society you’re apt to find right now; its understanding of our corporate nightmare and the economic game that pits us all against each other is enlightening and maddening in equal measure. If you haven’t already opened your eyes to the economic exploitation and hidden hellish manipulations of our system, The Mill will do it for you. You will be Mill-pilled.

A man wakes up in his business clothes, but he’s alone in an open-air jail of sorts. It’s a big room with no ceiling, and almost looks like an ancient prison, surrounded by concrete and with a heavy wooden contraption in its center. This is a circular mill, meant to grind and crush things through manual rotations. It’s heavy to push, but this is what the man has to do every day, and he has a quota of rotations he must complete to stay alive. The thing is, there are other ‘prisoners’ (or employees) here, and they each have quotas, too. At the end of the day, the lowest-performing person is ‘fired,’ if you will. The man doesn’t know their quotas or how many rotations they’re completing. The goalposts keep moving. But he has a pregnant wife, and he’ll do whatever it takes to survive and escape.

Sound familiar? Most of us in the working class live this life daily in one way or the other. We have quotas to meet, but are often expected to go beyond them and grow, always up and to the right. We compete against each other for slivers of praise and morsels of rewards, alienated from each other and the means of production itself. We spend less time with the ones we love, despite the fact that we usually work so much to support them. The mill keeps turning, but the only thing it’s grinding down is us.

Director Sean King O’Grady spoke to MovieWeb about his new film, written by Jeffrey David Thomas, which releases Oct. 9 on Hulu as part of their epic Huluween programming. We discussed the eerily timely nature of the film, the bravura performance from Lil Rel Howery, and the possibility of a sequel after that haunting ending.

AI and the Corporate Hell of The Mill
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Lil Rel Howery plays Joe (as in ‘an average Joe’), an employee of a massive futuristic company named Mallard, a kind of marriage of Google and Amazon. The man wakes up in the pseudo-prison after doing something to piss off his employers, and is instructed to rotate the mill on and on, endlessly. This corporate allegory comes at the perfect time, with the ‘Hot Labor Summer’ of 2023 fading into Fall as the working class continues to wake up to the fact that they’re overworked and underpaid by the owning class. From autoworkers and actors to health care professionals and more, 453,000 workers have participated in 312 strikes in 2023 alone, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker.

The creepy AI and technology at the heart of the evil fictional corporation in The Mill has striking similarities to our modern moment, but it wasn’t exactly planned that way. “Well, what’s interesting about it is that we didn’t know that it was going to speak so much to the current moment,” explained O’Grady. “The film that we made, we started hard prop, which means that we had our crew on the ground, we were building the sets, we’re doing all those things in November off 2022. And Chat GPT came out to the public in November of 2022.” He continued:

“Of course, we didn’t realize this until January when we stopped filming the movie because we were just in a bubble of making the film, not paying attention to the rest of the world. And so coming out of this set, telling this story about AI — which at the time was science fiction — to then emerge into a world where I can talk to AI on my cell phone was completely surreal and bizarre.”

“And then obviously, the labor issue started happening, whether it’s within Hollywood or UPS or in the UAW, so that just got even more surreal,” continued O’Grady. “I guess life reflects art and art reflects life. But in this case, they were converging, and still are, and it’s very strange.”

Lil Rel Howery Is the Everyman Worker
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Howery is an interesting choice to lead The Mill. He has innate comedic talents, and audiences will have immediate presuppositions when they see him. He has to play an everyman here, an average Joe, because Joe is us. The film is also primarily a one-man show, so the portrayal of Joe will make or break it. Fortunately, it’s the former.

Related: Stand-Up Comedians Who Became Great Actors

“You know, there’s a long history of comedic actors doing really just powerful dramatic turns. I think two of the greatest examples are Jim Carrey and Robin Williams,” explained O’Grady. “I had produced this movie called I Love My Dad that Rel is in, which is a comedy, and I saw the seriousness with which he approached his comedy and just his work in general. I just had in the back of my mind, like, I really want to make a dramatic film with this actor.”

And then when I read this script, he was the only person I could picture. He was the very first actor that I pictured, and we got really lucky that he read it and related to it, and felt the themes were as universal as I did was the rest of our team did.

“Working with him was interesting, because he’s a very detail-oriented actor. And so we talked through every single detail of the way we were going to shoot everything,” continued O’Grady. “We had a really good approach, we got to know each other really well. I think he was attached to the movie for about four months before we started shooting.” He went on:

“Why I tell you about all this prep work, is because once we started shooting, he became Joe. And honestly, between how real the set was that we built and how real Rel’s performance was, between how Rel became Joe and was reacting to the circumstances in there in this very real way — it was like shooting a documentary. I’ve made documentaries in addition to narrative films, and this, it was like a documentary with art direction. It was unlike any other experience I’ve ever had working with an actor.”

Related: Huluween: Every Spooky Show Streaming in October 2023

“Break Those Systems”

The Mill is grim in its corporate allegory, using philosophical ideas like Camus’ interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus and Nietzche’s concept of eternal recurrence. The film has to feel frustrating and oppressive, because it’s reflecting the systems that subjugate workers everywhere. However, it ends on a haunting but ultimately inspirational and righteous note, making the viewer want to rise up and take action. It leaves you wanting more.

We asked Sean King O’Grady if he’d be interested in working on a sequel, or if the sequel is meant to take place in real life, in the hands of the audience who can live it out. “All the above?” mused O’Grady. “First and foremost, I want this to be a really entertaining, thrilling movie that people can watch and have a good experience.” He continued:

But my lofty ambitions for it is that it makes people feel the same way I felt the first time I watched The Matrix. Like, I wanted to change my life after watching The Matrix. And I hope that similarly, people can look at this and want to break those systems that are treating them unfairly. Whether that’s a relationship, whether that’s their job, whatever it is.

“I think we all see times when we’re giving more to something than we’re getting back from it,” elaborated O’Grady. “And I hope that people examine those circumstances in their own lives. But as far as the storytelling, and the story is concerned, yeah, there are a lot more stories to tell in this world.”

“I also have a completely insane idea for taking this to the stage. I think it could be really interesting to actually have an actor acting against an AI. So we would have an AI Mallard that was reacting in real time to an actor, so it’s like improv, and it’s a dialogue between man and machine […] It’d never be the same, there would be different moments all the time, the story would change, it would evolve. I think you could have hundreds of different versions of this. No two audiences would see the same thing.”

Fortunately, all audiences can see the same version of The Mill on Hulu when it releases Oct. 9. It’s one of the year’s finest films.