In the grounds of a huge house in Manchester, dozens of dejected-looking young men and women – none of them fully dressed – mill around supercars they do not own. Nearby, a young woman with a faraway stare touches her lips in a rough facsimile of sexual availability. Inside, a Twister board lurks next to a pile of discarded clothes.

The whole setup is preposterously depressing, a kind of Requiem for a Dream for the modern-day influencer, but it turns out that the whole thing was designed as a content day for OnlyFans models – a way for them to spiral through outfits and locations and poses at speed for content they can dole out to subscribers over the coming months. Done right, it will make them rich.

But not as rich as their manager, who stands in the background with a rocket lolly in his hand. These are all his clients, and he will take 30% of the income earned by each of them. Little wonder he looks pleased with himself. And yet as monumentally grim as this tableau is – like an art installation designed to be as unsexy as possible – the BBC documentary OnlyFans: Inside the Machine is keen to let you know that this is still the system at its most legitimate.

OnlyFans is, of course, an online subscription platform that has often presented itself as the ethical answer to sex work. The site makes a billion pounds annually, paying out millions to the creators who take photos and videos of themselves in return for cash. Seen through the lens of the platform itself, OnlyFans is an empowering vehicle for the unalloyed wealth generation. But where there is money, exploitation always follows. And if rubbing an ice-cream on your cleavage represents the respectable end of OnlyFans management, the documentary does an incredibly good job of showing how much worse it can get.

Essentially, a horde of young men (it is almost always young men) has entered the OnlyFans management game, often lured in by videos showing the extreme wealth such schemes can generate. The whole thing is transparently an unregulated get-rich-quick scheme, and as we learn, these managers are everywhere. Amber Haque, the film’s presenter, meets with Gia Clarke. Although Clarke is one of the UK’s most successful OnlyFans models, she is overwhelmed with approaches from would-be managers to the extent that she has to sift through them to find messages from paying subscribers. She calls one on camera. He promises to triple her income. She assumes that she’ll have to pay him 50% of it, and in return he’ll run her page into the ground.

How he’ll triple her income is never stated, but the implication is that it won’t be quite as ethical as OnlyFans likes to make out. One woman says her management pressured her into being more explicit on camera than she was comfortable with. Another says she was strangled by masked intruders after denying her manager’s attempts to pressure her into escorting. The film also uncovers an entire Telegram group of OnlyFans managers who teach each other how to coerce their models into doing what they want. The managers in this group sell models to each other without their knowledge. Many change the bank details on the accounts so the models never know how much they’re earning and can’t question when they don’t get enough of it back. The whole thing is resoundingly bleak.

What the film does brilliantly is position all of this in the crosshairs of the wider social moment. Young men commoditising women against their will is a very manosphere way of behaving, but then there’s also the studied impassivity of big tech to contend with. OnlyFans, the film alleges, knowingly turns a blind eye to these abuses to protect the bottom line. When creators write to them complaining about their treatment at the hands of unscrupulous managers, they typically receive in return a standard form letter from OnlyFans washing its hands of the whole mucky business. (The company says the following in response to the film: “OnlyFans take the safety of our users incredibly seriously and invest heavily in measures to protect our community. In addition to our own proactive safety controls, if anyone raises a concern about a creator’s account we will immediately restrict the account, conduct an investigation and take action to ensure the creator is in control of their OnlyFans account. We work closely with law enforcement to support investigations and with charities and expert groups to continuously evolve our safety features.”)

With stuff like this, you have to seize upon the smallest glimmers of hope. And the film presents us with the tiniest glimmer. A lawyer suggests that it is only a matter of time before the platform is sued for negligence given the sheer scale of human trafficking it seems to enable. If and when that happens, change is likely to come. Until then, Inside the Machine leaves you with the impression of a system where everyone takes a cut, but the women at the centre are left to pay the price.