Compliance - 2012 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker
Director:  Craig Zobel

Compliance is so strange that I don't even think I can discuss it without adding a jump.  After the jump, YOU WILL BE SPOILED.


I knew the story of Compliance going in (damn you random NPR interview!), and that's a shame, for me.  This film is best experienced without knowing anything about it, something which is near impossible in the current movie landscape.  On the other hand, the movie flashes an 'Inspired by true events' at the beginning, which basically means you are in for something that is unbelievable.  Your antennae will be raised, searching out what's true and what's false.  And there are many false notes struck by the caller - the viewer probably should be clued in to the fact that the caller is not really a police officer.  The rest of the film therefore becomes an exercise of mentally shouting to the participants that he is fake and to stop doing what he says.  Some of his lines are even comic when showed in that light, filled with irony.  I wonder if this film couldn't've been done better if his notes all sounded true?  The trouble is that the fast food manager believes this is a police officer but that the viewer does not, and the film only lets us know for sure about halfway through that the caller is fake.

But I wonder if the film is not instead an exercise in voyeurism of the sort that the caller (purportedly) engaged in - we want to see how far he can take it without slipping up.  We want to yell stop but we're also curious - that same kind of curiosity that leads people to talk about how Hitler really blew it and how he could've taken Europe if he'd been smarter.  If you're going to be evil, go all out, and this caller most certainly does.

However, since the film's characters don't know what's going on and we do, we elevate ourselves above the characters in the movie.  We think, we would be more skeptical, there's no way we would do what he instructs.  Indeed, the movie's final scene suggests that being a pleasant person is really the worst kind of person to be when you are dealing with people who are both authoritarian and evil.  Perhaps also part of the film's point isn't that police officers can wield too much power, but it's that they are expected by people to be arbitrary and demanding.  Or maybe that at bottom, we all just want to be told what to do.

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These things aside, I thought the direction was student-film ish at points (montages of things shot from unusual angles as a way of establishing place don't really do it for me).  I might've wanted this film to even be longer, a rare claim, seeing as how the last 15 minutes are a rush to find the perpetrator, and establish who's suing whom in this case.  It all is in the service of getting the final conversation between the manager, a lawyer, with her lawyer present, which is still very denoument.