The Mill (2023) feels like a latter day episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-), one that’s trying to alert us to the soul sucking purgatory of corporate life. The thing is, we all know these jobs are a pointless hell.
Corporate cog in the Mallard Corporation Joe (Lil Rel Howery) wakes up in an open air cell. High walls enclose a sandy floor with a millstone set in the middle. It’s Joe’s job to push this wheel in circles, notching up revolutions, day after day, so he can earn his way back to his pregnant wife and see his son born.
But as the demands of the Mallard algorithms become increasingly unachievable, Joe is pushed to his limits and beyond. Tormented by adverts promoting Mallard products, forced to survive on canteen food pushed through a hatch in the door, he becomes increasingly antagonistic to the company holding him, and tries everything he can to escape.
Director Sean King O’Grady and writer Jeffrey David Thomas do an okay job of realising the premise, but a single location that keeps Howery on screen for most of the film is a tough ask. There are two ways to handle this kind of constraint. You can either keep the dialogue to a minimum, have the character work things out and follow that struggle, or contrive the disembodied voice of someone in an adjacent cell. That way Joe has someone to talk to. The problem is, this disembodied voice serves no other function, he’s only there to explain what’s happening, and for me it’s a weak choice.
It would be wrong to call this an allegory, even a heavy handed one, because there is no hidden meaning. It’s clear from the off it has the Sisyphean demands of corporate culture firmly in its sights. Company targets and group quotas, individual effort and personal growth, are just corporate catchphrases to hide slavery, and who wants that?
