Compliance

The first thing you see when watching Compliance is the "Inspired by True Events" disclaimer, in letters so big you'd have to be blind to miss them. Normally, I find this information needless--what do I care if a movie is true or not? But Compliance definitely needs it, because as I watched I was dumbfounded that there are people that stupid, and without knowing this really happened I would have thought the writers were high when they wrote it.

Compliance is a perfectly fine film, directed by Craig Zobel, so I didn't hate it--I just hated the people in it, because the entire premise rests on a group of people that are completely gullible and dumb. A manager of a fast food joint gets a call from a policeman, telling her that her pretty employee has stolen from a customer. He can't be there, so he asks the manager to search her, eventually strip-searching her. Things even get worse, because it's a prank call, not from a cop at all.

Okay. Let's take a look at this. A policeman (not a detective, just an officer) calls and tells the manager that he has the regional manager on the other line. He then tells the girl that she must be guilty, because he has the customer with him. Later, he says that he's at her house, investigating her brother for drugs. All the while, the girl is naked, wearing nothing but an apron, and allows the manager's fiance to do a cavity search, then spank her, and then, presumably, she performs fellatio on him, all instigated by the policeman on the phone.

At no time does anyone think to call the police station to see if the guy is for real, call the regional manager to see if he's really on the phone with the cop, have the girl get in touch with her parents, if not a lawyer. The actor who plays the prankster (Pat Healy), is just a guy with a sick fetish, and even he can't believe the things these people will do, just because they think they are talking to a cop.

Zobel, in the supplementary material, mentions the Milgram Experiment, which showed how people are willing to obey authority figures, in an attempt to explain Nazism. But the fact that this has happened 70 times I think doesn't speak to obeying authority figures, it's just downright stupidity. When a cop asks you to spank a girl only the most moronic would continue to think it's a real cop.

The film, though enraging to me, has some fine acting, especially by Ann Dowd as the manager. Dreama Walker, as the girl, does some harrowing work. But this film is more interesting as a conversation piece that in it is as a piece of entertainment.