Sorry to Bother You, the directorial debut from rapper Boots Riley, which stole the spotlight at Sundance this year, is a weird movie. Whenever its main character, a telemarketer (the great Lakeith Stanfield), calls someone, his desk is transported into the room with them (it’s not really happening, but it is an undeniably unique, bizarre visual flourish); the telemarketer’s artist girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), does a performance in which the audience throws old cellphones, bullet casings, and balloons filled with lambs’ blood at her while she recites dialogue from The Last Dragon; and then, with about 20 minutes until the end of a movie, a naked horse-person falls out of a bathroom stall. I’m serious—or at least I think I am; it feels entirely possible that this was all a fever dream.
That’s how jarring, horrifying, and darkly comical the ending of Sorry to Bother You is, a sequence of events that amplifies the surreal feeling of an already disconcertingly surreal movie. It is bizarre and unforgettable, and completely unexpected—in an era when trailers spoil entire movies, Sorry to Bother You smartly and successfully kept the whole “horse-human hybrid monstrosities” thing under lock and key. I’m still trying to parse out what happened, and to nail down what it all meant. Maybe we should just talk it out.
By the third act of the movie, protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green has risen through the telemarketing ranks at a seedy company called RegalView after another black telemarketer (Danny Glover) advises him to chat with people on the phone using his “white voice.” A natural at “white voice,” Cash quickly becomes a “power caller,” which means he’s no longer selling bullshit products for marginal commission but parceling out expensive subsets of WorryFree, a company that exploits people facing financial hardship by offering free room and board for what amounts to indentured servitude. (WorryFree workers must share bunk beds and eat gruel, among other indignities.) Cash excels as a power caller; he’s one of the best RegalView has ever seen—almost as good as Hal Jameson, a telemarketer so legendary the company has photos of him having sex hanging on its walls.
With Cash earning so much money for RegalView—and in turn for WorryFree—the interest of WorryFree’s CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer, doing a perfect dystopian rich guy), is piqued, and in the middle of one of Lift’s swanky, orgy-inclined parties, the two sit down to talk opportunities. (It’s not particularly relevant, but you should know that during this meeting, Hammer is wearing a sarong and a blazer, and he kinda pulls it off.) It’s at this point—just before Lift is able to pitch his big idea—that Cash asks to go to the bathroom. And then he goes in the olive-colored door instead of the jade-colored door. And then he discovers a horse-human hybrid, naked and begging for help.
Cash is understandably horrified, but Lift can explain. His company has developed a “new miracle,” a formula that, when ingested by low-level workers, turns them into “equi-sapiens” and, thus, a source of more efficient labor that “hopefully complains less.” Here’s where Cash comes in: Lift aspires to create an entire, separate civilization for his working-class horse people, and he wants Cash to also become an equi-sapien, be WorryFree’s man on the inside, keep the rest of the workers in check, and stop any strikes. He literally tells Cash he could become the Martin Luther King Jr. for horse people (!!), and that eventually they’d give him a formula that would change him back into a human. The job is a five-year contract that pays out $100 million, Lift explains, before tossing in what he believes to be the ultimate sweetener: “You’re gonna have a horse cock.” (The look of jubilation on Hammer’s face when he says “horse cock” will be etched in my memory for the rest of time.)
Soooooooo, yeah. To recap: As Sorry to Bother You is rounding toward home, a NAKED HORSE-MAN WITH A GIANT PENIS pops up, and then a wealthy white man calmly explains that it’s just part of a totally normal plan to alleviate and streamline labor costs. It is a lot to digest. But Sorry to Bother You’s nightmarish equi-sapien twist fits right into Riley’s anticapitalist message. Like the movie itself, it’s excessive and unsubtle, which is the point.
From the names of the characters—“Cash” Green, Steve Lift, a RegalView unionizer named Squeeze, Detroit, and a white middle-manager named Diana DeBauchery—to companies like WorryFree and RegalView, Sorry to Bother You doesn’t shroud itself in abstract metaphors so much as it tells you outright how to interpret its capitalist dystopia. That isn’t a bad thing; in fact, it might make Sorry to Bother You a bit more accessible to viewers who are already experiencing sensory overload because of the movie’s trippy visual flourishes and, again, THE HUMAN-HORSE HYBRIDS.
Clear out the fog of utter shock and it’s clear that the equi-sapiens serve a purpose: To emphasize points about how companies like WorryFree perceive their own beleaguered workers, how the endgame of capitalism is terrifyingly bleak, and how the government (and frankly, consensus public opinion) will forever side with moneymaking conglomerates. When Cash successfully releases a video of Lift abusing one of his equi-sapien test subjects, instead of national condemnation, WorryFree’s stock actually rises and draws more Republican support. Lift’s equi-sapien pitch might’ve been the final straw for Cash, but it doesn’t stop WorryFree’s ascendancy—it reinforces it. The ultimate goal in a capitalistic society is to be good at turning a profit, and WorryFree is rewarded in kind.
Sorry to Bother You is a movie made for our times. While the Get Out comparisons to Sorry to Bother You are a touch overstated—they both have black writer-directors, elements of horror, Lakeith Stanfield, and that’s about it—both movies appeal to the viewer’s humanity and transform common-sense fears (liberal racism and the ever-growing hand of capitalism, respectively) into surrealist nightmares, the point being that oftentimes, familiar horror can be mined from our own headlines. Horse people are scary, but frankly, that a CEO turning people into a mutated, cheap, and easy labor force doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch is the scariest part of all.
