Written and directed by Craig Zobel, Compliance challenges viewers with just how far they would go to follow authority. Set in a fast-food chicken franchise, 60-ish manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) is faced with a heavy Friday-night crowd, a bacon shortage, and young employees who would rather be partying.
When a man who identifies himself as police officer Daniels (Pat Healy) calls that evening and informs Sandra that Becky (Dreama Walker), one of her teen counter girls has taken money out of a customer’s purse, the film kicks into emotional high gear.
Daniels claims he is working with Sandra’s regional manager and has some surveillance footage to back up his claim. Sandra, follows Daniel’s instructions and confronts Becky in a back room, where she searches her belongings and reluctantly agrees to strip-search the teen. Daniels knows how to press all the right buttons with his callers and he does so with veiled delight, even to the point of insisting they call him “sir”.
When Becky’s young co-worker friend Kevin is called in to watch Becky, now half naked, he becomes suspicious and leaves. Daniels then turns to Sandra’s fiance, Van (Bill Camp) who is called in to watch Becky. A simple old contractor, Van is reluctantly drawn into Daniel’s police procedure scenario. Here the film takes on a decidedly dark tone, for Van is not only persuaded to spank Becky for disobeying Daniel but agrees to allow Becky to sexually gratify him.
The casting is right on and so is the direction, with Zobel using tight claustrophobic back room settings, nuanced character pauses, and dialog that’s disturbingly convincing. The busyness of a fast food restaurant dovetails nicely with the revolving door sequences of characters involved in Becky’s humiliation. Most employees, intent on “helping the investigation” move forward, become “good soldiers” for what they see as the corporate cause and police SOP.
Compliance is based on true events. In 2004, a McDonald’s in Mt. Washington, Kentucky, experienced a similar incident when a man who identified himself as a police officer telephoned the restaurant and talked employees to ultimately engage in a sexual assault. As many as 70 similar phone calls occurred across the country over nearly a decade. In defining Compliance, Zobel added these case histories to the results of Yale University experiments that focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
Compliance faced some criticism and a few walkouts when it was shown at Sundance. Yet it remains an important little film and a wake-up call to all those who have forgotten the 1960’s warning: question authority.
Alex A. Kecskes is a published author of "Healer a Novel" and "The Search for Dr. Noble"—both now available on Amazon. He has written hundreds of film reviews and celebrity interviews for a wide variety of online and print outlets. He has covered red carpet premieres and Comic-Con events for major films and independent releases.
