Sorry To Bother You is probably going to be the weirdest movie you see this year unless the Warner siblings decide to get freaky with Aquaman. But don’t let weirdness discourage you. Sorry To Bother You is one of those rare films in which a writer says “you know what, fuck it, I’m going all-in on this batshit idea,” intertwines it with more jokes that only work in the confines of its own crazy world than you can notice on the first try, and packs it with stingingly relevant commentary… and it works. Sorry To Bother You reminds you why filmmaking is such a fabulously versatile art form and why we go to theaters.
More than anything, Sorry To Bother You is a surrealist criticism of, well, a whole lot of things. Art. Racial inequality. Labor relations. But mostly it’s on top of our uniquely American (and in this case, Californian) form of Machiavellian zombie capitalism. Honestly, I don’t even like describing what this movie is about because it makes it sound preachy. And if Sorry To Bother You is anything, it’s not preachy. Sorry To Bother You is, I’m sure, getting a lot of comparisons to Idiocracy and Get Out right now, but it stands entirely on its own and doesn’t resemble any other satirical film or social commentary I’ve ever seen. If anything, writer and director Boots Riley’s probably the closest we’ve got to Johnathan Swift writing screenplays. And even that’s not a great comparison because Sorry To Bother You, at least for me, blurs the line between hyperbolic satire and reality because its plot is, frankly, so damned believable right now.
Lakeith Stanfield, playing our protagonist, Cassius Green, perfectly shepherds us down that blurred line. While he’s not exactly the story’s voice of reason—that role belongs to Detroit (Tessa Thompson), Cassius’s authentic-as-hell girlfriend and an artist who’s setting up her exhibitions when she’s not twirling promotional signs on the streets of Oakland—he’s faced with impossible choice after impossible choice, chewing over the same ethical dilemmas we would (and are) in the same situations. From taking a lowly job as a telemarketer at RegalView because he won’t sign a lifetime labor contract with the Amazon du jour WorryFree company to crossing his friends’ picket line because he can’t afford not to take a promotion, Cassius is constantly faced with the need to ignore his own moral compass in order to make practical decisions in situations largely forced upon him by those with greater power. Contrasted with Detroit, who speaks her mind both verbally and through enormous statement earrings and refuses to let the weight of poverty harsh her vibe, it’s clear from the start that Sorry To Bother You is all about plumbing the depths of economic decision-making when nearly all the possible outcomes are stacked in favor of the people forcing you into the decision in the first place.
That’s where Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer, comes in. Lift (real quick: what a great fucking name for this character) is a mix of Jeff Bezos, Elizabeth Holmes, and Travis Kalanick whose brainchild, WorryFree, is a company that guarantees people work and prison-style housing for life in the form of a slavery contract, whose labor he sells to other companies. Lift is the embodiment of the parasitic, soulless, and morally vacant “innovators” currently sucking the Bay Area and Seattle dry.
Once Cassius reaches “Power Caller” status after his coworker Langston (Danny Glover) teaches him how to make sales using his white voice, Cassius is invited to take a break from selling weapons in RegalView’s penthouse office to attend one of Lift’s infamous parties (think Justin Timberlake’s club scene as Sean Parker in The Social Network mixed with the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut). Impressed with Cassius, Lift takes him into his office to make a modest proposal.
This is where the twist happens. I don’t have a spoiler section below and I won’t talk about the details of the twist here at all because you ought to see it yourself. But I will say that when I saw it, I had about a quarter second of “OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCKKGFHDHDFSHHJDSA” before my heart rate returned to normal and I quickly realized “wait, no, okay, this is totally something that’s already happening at Jeff Bezos’s house.” And this is why I don’t want to compare Sorry To Bother You to Idiocracy or Get Out: the satire in Sorry To Bother You isn’t a joke about how bad things could get or a social commentary that relies on somewhat fantastic plot devices, it’s really only a slight exaggeration of shit that’s happened before or is happening right now. My personal favorite scene in the movie is when Cassius goes on the hit show "I Got the S#*@ Kicked Out of Me!" to get beaten and literally covered in shit in exchange for airtime to reveal the larger implications of Lift’s proposal to the public, only for people to immediately cheer Lift while Congressmen stand beside him as he rings the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
My only complaints about Sorry To Bother You are that some of the jokes fell flat and Detroit starts out as a token girlfriend character. It’s clear that Riley spent a lot of time thinking about this concept and the movie is packed with jokes, slights, and self-references of all sizes but not all of them stick the landing tonally or in the context of their scenes. Detroit blossoms into the story’s strongest character but at first there isn’t much indication that she’ll be anything other than an encouraging companion for the male protagonist other than knowing it would be really unlike Tessa Thompson to take that sort of role. Luckily, that turns out to be true.
I’ll finish by saying that Sorry To Bother You is an interesting example of how we in the United States handle self-reflection in the movie theater. Sorry To Bother You is an absolute trip down a rabbit hole. And a lot of our satire is like that: we tend to chastise ourselves at the movies by broadly poking fun at our problems. We laugh and point and say “that’s so true” and maybe go out for ice cream afterward. Sorry To Bother You says a lot about the moral rot of our particular economic setup and how our complacency toward that equates to complicity. This isn’t to say that nobody outside the U.S. makes satirical films at all, but our self-reflective movies, more often than not, are comedies or hold back on the criticism just enough not to offend audiences too much. I’ve spent most of this review purposefully not comparing this film to others, but after you’ve seen Sorry To Bother You I’d recommend watching Loveless, a Russian film by Andrey Zvyagintsev that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars earlier this year. The two aren’t directly comparable—Loveless is, in part, a scathing statement on life in Russia and acceptance of, if not participation in, the erosion of basic human values in modern Russian society—but in certain respects both films self-reflect on common issues in drastically different ways. Sorry To Bother You makes its points through surrealist comedy while Loveless uses a dark family drama. I won’t opine either way but see both and ask yourself if a film like Loveless could work here, a place where hilariously weird satires like Sorry To Bother You do. Can we handle criticism at the movies if it’s not funny?
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