Starirng Lil Rel Howery, Pat Healy, Karen Obilom and Patrick Fischler

Directed by Sean King O’Grady

Joe (Lil Rel Howery) is a Mallard Corporation employee who wakes up in a room with a millstone in it and no memory of how he got there. He discovers he’s in a cell and his neighbour (Patrick Fischler) tells him that they are employees and Mallard have given them one job; turn the mill stone. Whoever turns it the least is killed at the end of every day. If you turn it too much, your total becomes the quota for everyone else. Informed by Mallard’s perkily relentless AI that this is all part of his ‘career path’ Joe has no choice if he ever wants to make it home…

The latest in a long line of excellent movies from Hulu, The Mill punches way about its weight. Howery’s dramatic skills are the axis the entire movie turns around and he’s more than up to the job. James is a company man to the core, constantly working at the expense of his family life. His wife Kate (Karen Obilom) is expecting, and he finds himself trapped between the need to be there for her and the need to provide for her. It’s masculine anxiety of a very particular sort and the core of both the movie and Howery’s performance. It’s also the engine that takes the movie to some surprising places as Joe’s need to push himself resonates across multiple thematic levels. Howery does a great job of balancing his near obsessive need to prove himself with a realization of what that costs. His work in the final five minutes in particular is superb.

The rest of the cast impress too. Karen Obilom gets the least to do but Jeffrey David Thomas’ script gives us a very good reason for that, while Pat Healy’s cheerily violent guard is a constant presence balanced by genre stalwart Fischler’s nervy voice from the next cell over. Joe’s world becomes defined by these two men and the precision brutality of the Mallard AI and it breaks him in fascinating and awful ways. Joe’s a good guy but he’s not a hero and the choices he makes feel very realistic and grounded, even as the movie begins to take some steps away from that tone.

King O’Grady’s direction is careful, precise and nightmarish and the ending brings his work, Howery’s and Thomas’s together in a manner that honestly surprised me. You will probably figure out what’s going on here relatively quickly. You won’t figure out the ending and the final moment makes the whole ride one well worth taking.

Verdict: Inventive, minimalist, furious storytelling and the exact sort of SF that 2024 in the western world requires. Highly recommended. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart