Compliance

"What is the point of this movie?" is the kind of question most people can imagine coming from a stuffy, self-appointed gatekeeper-type critic. It is the type of criticism that assumes a movie is required to impart something, be it a message, inspiration, a sense of wonder, or serve some other undefined greater good beyond just serving as entertainment. These fart-sniffers can't tolerate the idea of a movie existing for the sake of being entertaining in some way, be it an action-packed thrill ride, an armrest-gripping horror show, or a libido-raising erotic whirlwind. But there are times when the question is valid. 13 Cameras, a truly repugnant movie, wastes the viewer's time getting to know a couple for 80 minutes, and then has them taken out in the last ten, rendering their entire journey pointless. I Spit On Your Grave is a vile, reprehensible piece of garbage without merit that wallows in giving viewers an exhaustively detailed look at sexual assault and abuse of the mentally handicapped. When a movie's very nature seems to be to make viewers squirm uncomfortably, or otherwise wish they were doing something else, questioning the movie's existence becomes valid. Compliance is nowhere near as terrible as those movies, but it did leave me wondering why it existed, albeit for entirely different reasons. The movie was inspired by the real series of prank calls to stores and restaurants that conned people into performing strip searches and other humiliating sexual acts on an unsuspecting employee or customer. Compliance deals specifically with the last of these calls, where a young employee of a fast food restaurant was subjected to a full strip search, cavity search, a spanking, and convinced to perform oral sex on a non-employee "guarding" her while waiting for the police to arrive. Names were changed, and the restaurant was turned into something fictional for the purposes of the movie, but the movie hews very, very close to the real sequence of events that brought an end to the caller's reign of terror, and the humiliation and assault of a young woman who did nothing wrong whatsoever. The prank itself was dependent on the idea that people will invariably follow the commands of an authority figure, even if unseen and the commands seem beyond the pale, as long as they seem authoritative enough. Compliance documents this thoroughly, keeping very close to how the young woman in question was made to strip naked, allow employees to view her body in great detail, and when the manager needed to tend to the business, how a non-employee was allowed to watch over her and perform increasingly illegal acts of humiliation and sexual assault. Compliance is nowhere near as graphic in portraying these as the aforementioned I Spit In Your Grave, but it does portray them in some way nonetheless. One could say, then, that the purpose of Compliance is to examine the willingness of good people to be convinced to do bad things because a supposed authority figure is telling them to do so, and how easy it is to groom and manipulate an average person. It seems to challenge the viewer to ask themselves if they would've been so bold as to refuse the orders of the phony police officer. From an acting standpoint, I give Ann Dowd (playing the manager of the restaurant), Dreama Walker (playing the unfortunate employee) and the rest of the cast credit for portraying regular people stuck in this terrible situation, weighing if doing something that sounds wrong is right when a cop says so. Dowd is desperate not to endanger her job after an employee caused a very costly screw-up the night before, so she goes along with it, even though it feels wrong. Walker is defiant at first, insisting on her innocence, but by the end, she is so worn down with the demands that she complies no matter how outrageous the orders are because it beats going to jail on trumped-up charges. Compliance is a sad, uncomfortable movie that reveals just how easy it is to pull the wool over an average person's eyes and get them to cross lines they would never consider in any other circumstance. Unfortunately, though, the very nature of Compliance -- that it is based on a true story -- is also its greatest weakness. Firstly and most obviously, one could just as easily get the real details of the entire case, not just this one call, from any number of true-crime shows and documentaries if one was really interested in it. It probably won't leave you feeling any less icky, but a true-crime show won't be as thorough in its documentation of the events, and a perfect example is Dreama Walker's nude scenes in this. The real woman who went through this was indeed stripped naked, so I get the need to give the appearance of her nude state, but there was no need to show several scenes of Dreama Walker's breasts fully exposed. It doesn't do anything that a shot from behind showing her bare shoulders, or a shot at the floor showing her clothes hitting the ground, doesn't accomplish, other than either titillation or making the audience complicit in the simulated exploitation. Nudity is never strictly necessary in any movie outside of pornography, but there are places where one can accept it because of the circumstances. When Ms. Walker is doing naked jumping jacks, and we're watching her breasts bounce up and down, it doesn't even remotely feel necessary. It feels prurient and hypocritical. This is but a thread, though, in the larger tapestry of this movie's difficult-to-parse existence, and that is this: Compliance never actually says anything about, or approaches any sort of examination into the psychology behind what happened. It goes through the motions of the events of that day with the intellectual exploration of a child coloring their place mat at Denny's. If anything, instead of raising questions about the overly exalted position police enjoy in American culture or the psychological aspects of the relationship between authority figure and subject, it makes people from a small town look like simple-minded rubes that can be led around by the nose, even if the path leads them into a blindingly obvious death-trap. Writer/director Craig Zobel's adherence to the actual events, but portraying them with such a lack of emotion, turns Compliance into a movie-length version of the re-enactments seen on those true-crime shows this is taking so much inspiration from. Normally, I get annoyed with inspired-by-true-story movies that treat the facts like bingo hopper, but in this case, some dramatic license might've been in order. Either go full smartest-guy-in-the-room and really get in the weeds with the psychological aspect (maybe turn it into the psychological thriller the trailer sets it up to be), or go full-bore on the exploitation aspect and fill the movie with more sleaze and nudity than a Porky's marathon. Sitting in the middle, trying to stick to the facts but doing nothing with them, while needlessly dipping a toe into the waters of exploitation, leaves the movie adrift. It's an R-rated episode of Forensic Files. Which brings us back to the opening statement: what is the point of this movie? I honestly don't know. The acting is great, and the atmosphere is claustrophobic. It's not that the movie is outright bad so much as it never justifies its own existence, going unnecessarily far in recreating events, but doing nothing with its themes beyond throwing on the table like a dead fish. If you're interested in the case, you'll get the same level of information from any number of true-crime shows or documentaries done on it, or just read the Wikipedia page on it, and you won't be let down by the lack of depth or the unwanted ick factor.