Compliance is the story of a fast food restaurant manager who receives a phone call from a police detective. The detective has fielded a complaint from a customer regarding stolen money, and he's asking the manager to detain one of her employees for a search. But in truth, the "detective" is really a prank phone caller with incredible powers of persuasion and a twisted desire to see just how far he can make people go. The manager's initial (perhaps-sensible) steps down a strange path are just the beginning of an incredibly dark journey.
Compliance is not a movie for everyone. It's made on the cheap, so people looking for high production values aren't going to get them. It has few recognizable actors; the two biggest stars are Ann Dowd, a working actress who has appeared in dozens over minor roles over the years, and Dreama Walker, one of the stars of the likely-just-cancelled TV series "Don't Trust the B---- in Apt. 23."
But the real reason this movie won't be for everyone: Compliance is damned uncomfortable to watch. The movie is meant to make you squirm. As the prank caller pushes his victims into increasingly outrageous demands, the audience is constantly forced to ask themselves, "would I have fallen for any of this? At what point would I have woken up and challenged this insanity?" And ultimately, "wait, would anyone fall for this?" The movie ends up in such a dark place that it's literally unbelievable. The careful dance of tension that works for the first hour falls apart in the last half hour because it all becomes simply too outrageous.
And yet here's the catch: Compliance is based on a true story. A serial prank phone caller actually operated for nearly a decade, and the incident depicted here in this film actually happened. A few details are twisted around just a bit for the movie, but from what I've been able to find with a little research, what happens here is actually 90% accurate or more to the real events. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
It's a credit to writer-director Craig Zobel that this story comes off believable at all. There's going to come a point for every viewer where the chain of events feels too implausible (maybe a different point for different viewers). But it does start out believable. Maybe you wouldn't be dumb enough to fall for a stranger on the phone identifying himself as a cop, but you can see how it happened for these characters. That things do eventually come off the rails is perhaps not the movie's fault. I wonder if any writer and director could have made it believable where the story ends up -- even if it is the real world truth.
In any case, Compliance is certainly a provocative movie. It will get you thinking, and would certainly spark a conversation between two people who had seen it. I grade it a B+ and, as I noted earlier, award it the #10 slot on my list of best films of 2012. (For now, anyway.)
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