{"id":201836,"date":"2026-03-12T19:59:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T19:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/201836\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T19:59:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T19:59:07","slug":"brea-grant-gets-in-the-grind-at-sxsw-the-austin-chronicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/201836\/","title":{"rendered":"Brea Grant Gets in the Grind at SXSW \u2022 The Austin Chronicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you ask Brea Grant what her worst non-filmmaking job was, she\u2019s got an easy answer: a certain now-defunct Austin Tex-Mex chain, where she worked as a kitchen expediter while she was in grad school at UT. \u201cIt was so tough,\u201d she said. \u201cSometimes I\u2019d be on shift until three in the morning and end up with a 6am shift the next day.\u201d Even worse was their spillage policy. Drop too many plates, and you had to take a class. Drop alcohol, and it came out of your paycheck. Grant recalled, \u201cThey would post how much we cost the restaurant, how much food we had wasted by dropping, and I was always at the top because I was working with the most food and I was the most clumsy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experiences like that inspired her new film as writer\/director, anthology horror Grind, which receives its world premiere at this year\u2019s South by Southwest. In four interlocking stories of workplace horror, stressed-out employees and hustlers end up grist for the mill of the demonic and pervasive corporation called DRGN. All corporations seem to be evil these days, \u201cbut it\u2019s truly from Hell,\u201d Grant said.<\/p>\n

Grant explained that she and Grind co-creator Ed Dougherty had wanted to work together for years. They were both huge fans of anthologies, so now they just had to settle on a topic. She said, \u201cWe both come from this punk, anti-establishment background, and we\u2019re looking around and the thing that people are really bothered by now right now is work, capitalism, and the lack of money.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While she previously acted in creepy Christmas anthology All the Creatures Were Stirring<\/a> and has directed three features before (the Austin-made Best Friends Forever, medical fever dream 12 Hour Shift<\/a>, and crazed country shocker Torn Hearts), Grind is her first anthology as a filmmaker. For the format, she was inspired by one her personal favorites, 2015\u2019s Southbound, where the individual chapters interlink to build a bigger world, \u201cso it feels like a feature, it feels cohesive, but it also feels like four different stories,\u201d Grant said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why, rather than taking the path of having each segment written by different people, like the V\/H\/S franchise, she and Dougherty wrote the entire script before bringing other filmmakers on to direct some chapters. Grant said they approached the job like showrunners. \u201cWe wanted to treat it like a TV show or a movie, and so we wanted to create the whole world ourselves:\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That dedication to coherence continued through production. \u201cWe used some of the same actors, we used the same color scheme, we used the same lenses. We were doing everything so it felt like the same universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

And a full universe is exactly what they created. She added, \u201cWe have so much lore for this world, you wouldn\u2019t believe. We had a writers\u2019 room with one of our buddies where we sat down and built the entire universe. There\u2019s so many things we have references to that don\u2019t make it into the movie. Hopefully, if there\u2019s a Grind 2, we get to keep spreading the lore of Grind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their initial inspiration came from Grant and Dougherty \u201cswapping war stories about horrible bosses we\u2019ve had,\u201d she explained. However, opening segment \u201cMLM,\u201d which they shot as a proof-of-concept a year before the rest of the film, was inspired by the 2021 Amazon docu-miniseries, LuLaRich, about the LuLaRoe apparel empire. Other chapters came directly from scanning Reddit and conversations with friends, where the horror comes from the real fear within the modern workplace. \u201cUnion Meeting\u201d gets inside how you can\u2019t trust your bosses or your colleagues and \u201cContent Moderation\u201d gets on the never-ending treadmill of promised promotions, while \u201cDelivery\u201d extrapolates its fears from the \u201cloneliness and the repetitiveness\u201d of app-based delivery driving. Grant said, \u201cIt\u2019s such a part of current-day hustle culture, and a lot of people I know do that to subsidize their acting career or their filmmaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\nGrind<\/p>\n

Midnighters, World Premiere<\/p>\n

Thursday 12, 10:30pm, Alamo Lamar<\/p>\n

Sunday 15, 5:45pm, Alamo Lamar<\/p>\n

Wednesday 18, 10:15pm, Alamo Lamar\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A note to readers:\u00a0Bold and uncensored,\u00a0The Austin Chronicle\u00a0has been Austin\u2019s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community\u2019s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you ask Brea Grant what her worst non-filmmaking job was, she\u2019s got an easy answer: a certain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,79554,2970,79388],"class_list":["post-201836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-brea-grant","tag-sxsw-2026","tag-sxsw-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}