This victimised teen is Becky, a small-town counter girl at an understaffed fast food joint played by the notably attractive Dreama Walker (“Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23”). Her manager is the middle-aged, overworked Sandra (Ann Dowd, “Side Effects”), who, on the restaurant’s busiest day of the week, receives a phone call from a man who identifies himself as Police Officer Daniels (Pat Healy, “The Innkeepers”). He needs Sandra’s help: it seems a pretty young blonde among her staff, whom Sandra guesses to be Becky (“Ah yes, Rebecca!” recalls the caller), has been accused of stealing money from a customer, and it is up to Sandra to detain the suspect until a squad car can arrive on the scene. Eager to cooperate, Sandra escorts Becky into the storage room, where Becky stubbornly protests her innocence and where “Officer Daniels” has a few tasks for the pair to perform for him.
What unfolds in that room is several harrowing hours of humiliation and violation, as conducted by the disembodied voice of a phoney policeman: using fine-tuned tactics of persuasion and manipulation, “Officer Daniels” slowly but surely coerces Sandra into stripping Becky from head to toe and subjecting her to an all manner of emotional, psychological and eventually physical abuse, all while oblivious customers eat in peace at the tables outside. What’s most remarkable about the film is not that it’s based on a true story — it’s that it’s based on over 70 true stories. From 1992 through to 2004, similar incidents were reported across 30 US states, as fast food chains were targeted by a sadistic prank caller who convinced staff members to conduct strip searches, and sometimes more than that, on unsuspecting female employees.
“Compliance” most closely resembles one specific case in 2004 where events escalated further into depravity than they ever had before, and in recreating that devastating night, Zobel presents us with a fascinating, if flawed insight into how human beings respond to the illusion of authority — almost immediately, “Officer Daniels” demands that he be called “sir,” and almost immediately, Sandra falls in line, willing to betray her most basic moral values in the name of following the officer’s every order, no matter how sleazy, nor indeed how criminal. Called into question is whether or not Sandra herself is a victim in all of this (she is, after all, cruelly manipulated), but one could argue that she’s not the one left to quiver and weep in the corner while wearing nothing but an all-too-revealing apron.
I say the film’s insight is flawed because although Walker and Dowd succeed in creating believable characters — the sort we might recognise from our own lives — the actions they commit and the situation in which they find themselves are inherently unbelievable. That such implausible events truly did occur in the spring of ‘04 doesn't let the film off the hook, as it fails to supply a sufficient reason as to why no one at any point ever thinks to question the caller's true identity. This is particularly jarring when Sandra’s fiancé enters the equation, is handed the phone and as the film launches, in its most shocking scenes, into full-on sexual assault — this leaves us to wonder, as one baffled lawman later remarks, just what exactly was in these people’s chicken. Still, this is a gripping film, Zobel ratcheting up the tension to near-unbearable levels and presenting a deeply penetrating experience that will not be easily forgotten — “Compliance” is a film that crawls its way under your skin and refuses to leave.
7/10
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