Compliance (2012)

Compliance (2012) – When a prank caller convinces a fast food restaurant manager to interrogate an innocent young employee, no-one is left unharmed.

I have been wanting to offer my thoughts on this film for a while now, yet it’s proven to be a tricky one to write about. I know my good friend Eric is having the same dilemma, so I’ll try and beat him to it and give you my take. Compliance takes its plot from 70 cases preceding 2004, in which a man who worked as a correctional officer called fast-food restaurants pretending to be a real police officer who was trying to apprehend a thief. He would order the managers of various restaurants to strip search a female employee, or commit far worse acts. The actual events can be seen on Wikipedia by clicking this link: strip search prank call scam and the specific event in question in this movie is the Mount Washington, Kentucky, incident at a McDonald’s restaurant.

As for the movie itself, Compliance, by writer/director Craig Zobel, is set at fictional fast food restaurant ChickWich. At this mid-America fast-food outpost, restaurant manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) is having a bad night even before the phone call comes. Police officer Daniels (Pat Healy – who incidentally I preferred in this role rather than his appearance in The Innkeepers), as he identifies himself, claims pretty teenage counter girl Becky (Dreama Walker) was seen stealing money from a purse.

He instructs Sandra to take Becky into a storage closet. Overwhelmed by her managerial responsibilities, Sandra complies with the officer’s orders to detain Becky. He then uses the phone to instruct everyone — Sandra, Becky, co-workers, even Sandra’s fiancé — to pile on the humiliation, until an actual sexual assault happens.

I found myself at first watching and laughing at how ridiculous this all was, and when the officer was instructing them over the phone, I can 100% say I would have put the phone down. We all would, right? Yet I had to keep reminding myself that this was REAL, and happened to varying degrees 70 other times!! Every event in this movie was from actual police documents and evidence, and some were even caught on video. It sounds crazy that people would actually fall for this, and not just one person, but it goes to show the lengths some people will go to when dealing with law enforcement. Whilst I can sit here and say there is no way I would fall for this, unless I’m in that position, how can I say for sure? I mean, I definitely wouldn’t……would I? Would you?

I can’t really rate this as a proper movie in some regards, as it sounds so ridiculous and far-fetched, yet whilst some reviewers out there have bashed this not knowing it was from true events, the normal things I would want to talk to you about don’t apply here. Plot wise, it is what it is. A girl, made to do humiliating things by a voice over the phone. Why she does it when she blatantly knows she is innocent and hasn’t stolen anything is beyond me. The managers husband even gets involved and that’s where the sexual act comes into play. We don’t see anything too graphic, this is not that kind of movie and despite seeing Becky naked it never glorifies any of it, and the act happens off-screen.

Everyone seems to rave about Ann Dowd’s performance as Sandra, she even picked up some awards for it, but for me the main star on show here was Dreama Walker. Whilst I couldn’t believe her character did the things she did, she acted the hell out of the role in a terribly naive and innocent (gullible?) way. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, as I hate to see people taken advantage of.

Compliance isn’t for everyone. Zobel’s competently crafted film follows just one example of a call to its unhappy and occasionally hard-to-watch conclusion. It’s a documentary ultimately, just shown to us like a movie. It can’t be frowned upon for being ridiculous because whilst it obviously is, this isn’t just some movie plot trying to get you to believe them with ludicrous acts; this is all straight out of police records. It simply has to be seen, if only to highlight the real life cases the movie here shows us.

As a side note, Compliance actually opens with the information regarding the Milgram Experiments of the 1960s, in which ordinary members of the public willingly electrocuted their peers on the bidding of men with white coats and clipboards. If you are interested in the psychological side of life, and true events like this, Compliance also reminded me of the Stanford prison experiment which I learned about through another film Das Experiment. I haven’t reviewed that film yet, but the links I included here are pretty insightful and I always enjoy a true story. Hopefully this may interest a few of you anyway.

Posted by Tysoncarter182 on April 15, 2013

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