Grind (2026) Review

There are plenty of horror films set around the workplace or working. Grind goes one better and suggests that work itself could now qualify as a horror film. With targets that cannot be met, algorithms that never sleep, customers who tip pennies and corporations that talk about “family” shortly before doing something monstrous. Somewhere along the way, the nine-to-five became the nine-to-never-stop.

Directed by Ed Dougherty, Brea Grant and Chelsea Stardust, this wonderfully cracked anthology takes aim at four particularly modern forms of employment misery, all linked by the looming presence of DRGN, a corporation whose reach extends into practically every badly paid corner of society.

The tone is established in a fulfillment warehouse where falling behind schedule earns more than a stern word from management. From there, Grind slips neatly into MLM, Brea Grant’s wonderfully deranged attack on pyramid schemes and the relentlessly cheerful language used to disguise financial exploitation.

Jessika Van plays Sarah, a new recruit selling Lala Leggings under the watchful eye of Barbara Crampton’s unnervingly perky company founder. Missing a sales target brings increasingly bizarre penalties, including one involving her husband and a small bird that is probably better discovered without explanation. The joke is ridiculous, but the target is not. These schemes sell independence while relying on desperation, and Grant pushes that contradiction into wonderfully silly body horror.

Delivery moves into gig-economy purgatory, with Vinny Thomas’s Benny chasing tiny profits from increasingly unreasonable food orders. A mysterious customer eventually sends him into a looping nightmare where every refusal resets the job with slightly more money attached. There’s something painfully recognisable in Benny knowing perfectly well that the assignment is dangerous and still asking how much it pays.

Ed Dougherty’s Content Moderation takes a nastier turn.

Christopher Rodriguez Marquette plays Joel, a former teacher lured towards a lucrative tech job, provided he can first survive “The Pit”. His task is to clear millions of submitted videos containing the sort of imagery most of us desperately hope somebody else deals with. Watching Joel process atrocity after atrocity is easily Grind’s most uncomfortable stretch, not least because the film barely needs to exaggerate the real-world job it is satirising. Somehow Rob Huebel’s Andy adds humour to this otherwise very bleak commentary on the depravity in social media.

The final story, Union Meeting, heads for broader territory as employees of a suspiciously familiar coffee chain attempt to organise, prompting DRGN to respond with the sort of union-busting measure that only makes sense in a horror anthology: unleash the mascot. It is amusingly bloody, although by this point the satire has become more blunt instrument than scalpel. Corporate opposition to organised labour hardly requires a monster costume to seem sinister.

Anthologies inevitably invite comparison, and Grind has its weaker stretches. Delivery becomes a little tangled in its own time-loop mechanics, while Union Meeting occasionally lets the gags overtake the idea beneath them. Yet the recurring characters, brands, background jokes and overall quality make the whole thing unusually cohesive. DRGN is everywhere, which is precisely the point.

Crampton and Huebel even make a return to put smiling faces on the corporate machine, both understanding that cheerful managerial language becomes even funnier (and somehow, still accurate) when attached to outright evil.

What keeps Grind moving is its avoidance of becoming a lecture. Grant, Dougherty and Stardust are rightly furious about the systems they are skewering, but they also understand that a sermon about wealth inequality is unlikely to improve anybody’s Friday night. So there are monsters, bodily transformations, blood, terrible bosses and at least one exceptionally garish pair of leggings.

A little loose in places, sharp in others and fuelled by a pleasingly punkish contempt for corporate greed, Grind turns the modern workplace into exactly what many employees already suspect – a machine designed to keep feeding until there is very little of you left. It’s great fun, highly re-watchable and something we can all get on board with!

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Grind clip