It’s been about eight years since national news reported the false imprisonment and sexual assault of a McDonald’s employee under the supervision of her female store manager, at the behest of a prank phone caller. At the time, rampant speculation regarding how otherwise normal adults could be manipulated into committing horrendous acts against a fellow employee soon followed. Because the prank phone caller posed as a police officer, is it a defense to say the store manager was only following orders? Or does it suggest that people willingly commit atrocities if they are relieved of the burden of personal responsibility? That is the crux of writer-director Craig Zobel’s Milgram experiment “Compliance.” Unfortunately for our society and humanity as a whole, Zobel doesn’t supply any easy answers to these questions.
Based on the aforementioned news story, “Compliance” shifts the setting to a snowy Ohio fast-food restaurant during a Friday night dinner rush. When an attractive cashier named Becky (Dreama Walker) is accused of stealing from a customer by a prank caller styling himself as Officer Daniels (Pat Healy), middle-aged store manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) is charged with the task of detaining Becky in the office until police arrive. As blissfully-ignorant customers eattheir value meals, Daniels issues Sandra and Becky an ultimatum: either Becky can be arrested at the restaurant and spend the night in jail or Sandra can help avoid an unnecessary spectacle by strip-searching her in the office. By creating a false dilemma that brings out Becky’s fear of jail and Sandra’s fear of corporate involvement, Daniels praises the employees for their cooperation by allowing Sandra to violate Becky further. When Daniels compels Sandra to bring one male coworker after another to monitor Becky, “Compliance” devolves into a repetitious, abhorrent waiting game for one employee to possess enough moral fortitude to hang up the phone.
Daniels’ ability to shape reality through language lends the film its terrifying power. Once he stops referring to Becky as a suspect and begins calling her a thief, Sandra and her coworkers begin to treat her as a criminal. As Daniels pumps each coworker for details to use against one another, he tightens his hold on all of them.
Meanwhile, Zobel’s documentary-styled direction gives “Compliance” an immediate, visceral quality that makes the film all the more difficult to watch. As Becky’s coworkers increasingly violate her body, the camera pushes intighter and tighter until Becky is only portrayed as a series of objectifying, disjointed close-ups. However, this conscientiously unpleasant viewing experience is necessary to expose what allows rational adults to act against their own morality.
What isn’t necessary is the epilogue tacked onto the end of the film that attempts to provide a conclusion via an interview between Sandra and a journalist (Jeffrey Grover) that doesn’t contribute any real insight into the character. By providing an outside perspective to the events of the film, perhaps Zobel needed to distance himself from the material lest he asks the same question the viewer asks: What would I do in this situation?
