Compliance, the third recent film to plausibly deal with people-who-couldn’t-possibly-be-THAT-dumb, is neither a documentary (The Imposter) nor a lurid thriller (Killer Joe), though it feels like both. The first impression in this frightening docudrama is that the highly uncomfortable situation depicted is largely the fault of the new all-time champion for main characters with shit-for-brains. Meet Sandra , who runs a fast food joint in Ohio. (Unlike The Imposter and Killer Joe, we can’t even blame a Texas setting). She possesses an unsettling combination of vulnerability and arrogance yet we’ll come to eventually discover that despite her grave shortcomings she’s probably only the second most foolish character in the film.
Sandra (an effectively understated Ann Dowd), an insecure middle-aged woman, fears her district manager’s inevitable discovery that one of her employees left the freezer door open overnight. So pressure surrounds an imminent busy weekend shift made the more miserable by the exclusion of bacon on the menu due to the freezer snafu. Sandra gives staff pep talks one minute, then lets her guard down the next, unsuccessfully trying to ingratiate herself with her much younger employees. One of whom is a perky blonde named Becky (Dreama Walker), who seems like a pretty normal teenager.
Then a phonecall comes in that will change the life of Becky and Sandra and will have you squirming in your seat. I’m sure screenings of Compliance often include multiple audience mutterings and exclamations back at the screen as a phony cop basically talks Sandy into strip-searching Becky, who he accuses of stealing money from a customer. Seems he needs Sandra to help him out with his investigation. Needless to say, he’s as slick as she is clueless and it doesn’t end there. Far from it.
Directed by Craig Zobel, Compliance proceeds to both horrify and taunt its audience. As unctouous as the man on the phone is, Sandra’s gullibility trumps it, allowing the viewer to take on an air of superiority to the proceedings. This could never happen to us. Yet who can begin to rule out complacency to authority figures in one regard or another? In a strictly workplace scenario? In the society at large? It’s fitting that Compliance contains at least two characters who don’t buy into the nonsense. Some critics, not far off the mark, have included civilian complicity in war crimes as within the scope of this film’s metaphoric focus. Luckily, the film is somewhat deceivingly grounded in the pulpy sphere (complete with plenty of cellos in Heather McIntosh’s effective score) which can either offset or ironically heighten the serious underpinnings, depending on how deep you want to go.
Before we give Zobel too much credit let us ask ourselves how can we be sure he’s not pulling a slick trick of his own here? Does he take poetic license and exaggerate? Apparently enough of these kinds of incidents existed “in real life” to warrant our full trust. Yet the devil was never more in the details. Unwilling to hang its hat solely on Sandra’s stunning naivete, Compliance goes the extra mile and presents both an overtly disciplined and studied perpetrator (an excellent Pat Healy), and a victim with just the right amount of initial outrage and eventual resignation (newcomer Walker). Compliance may be pushing the envelope ever so slightly but if this film were an earthquake the difference would be merely a meager fraction on the Richter scale. A disaster is a disaster and like most, it’s hard to divert our eyes.
4 You’ve Got To Be Kidding’s (out of 5)