Compliance

Compliance

Starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Philip Ettinger

Directed by Craig Zobel

Synopsis:
It began as an ordinary Friday at a fast food restaurant.  Sandra (Ann Dowd), the manager, was understaffed and faced a predicament of someone having left the freezer open overnight, spoiling some of the food.  She thought that would be the wort of her day, but the true terror was just beginning.

She receives a mysterious phone call from someone calling themselves Officer Daniels (Pat Healy), who tells Sandra that a customer has reported money being stolen from her by Sandra's employee Becky (Dreama Walker).  Sandra calls Becky to her office and, having been given orders by Officer Daniels on the phone, searches her.  This is only the beginning of a day of terror for Becky, and a prank that turns into something unthinkable.

Review:
The film begins with "based on actual events," and I've seen enough films to know that this is very loosely interpreted.  Unfortunately, this film follows very closely the real life events that took place.  In reality, a manager at a McDonald's in Kentucky received a phone call from someone calling themselves a police officer who tells her that someone reported money stolen by her employee, and the caller makes the manager do unspeakable things to the employee, and even gets other employees and outside people involved as well.

It's easy to wonder how people would be so easily lured into doing the unspeakable, but it's been done before.  The most famous was the Milgram experiments in the 1960s, where subjects abandoned their judgments and beliefs to follow someone they considered to be in authority.  We're told all the time to follow people in authority, and that's what the manager did in this case - even if it seems downright evil and wrong to us.

This is one of the few films I've ever seen that made me truly angry.  Not at the film itself, which is an excellent case study of the human psyche, but it infuriated me how they treated the employee - making her do the most unimaginable things just because someone on the phone told them to.  There were times I truly couldn't even watch what was happening because I was in such disbelief that it was actually happening - and not just for a film thought up by a person, but something that someone in real life actually went through.

The acting here is some of the best in the independent film world.  Dreama Walker begins the film as a bright eyed nineteen year old with her whole future ahead of her, and at the end she's reduced to a husk of a person, a shell of a being who has lost all the light in her eyes and someone who's lost all hope in humanity.  As the oddly submissive manager, Ann Dowd also gives an electric performance, someone you want to think of as another victim, but are more drawn to seeing her as a villain and willing accomplice in the brutality of her employee. 

Summary:
"Compliance" is one of those rare films that grips you long after it ends, and forces you to ask yourself the most darkest question - how far would you go to obey someone you think is in authority?

My Rating: A+