When the words "Inspired by true events" appear at
the start of Compliance, they are written in a font size that takes up the
whole screen. You can understand writer-director Craig Zobel's determination to
make sure everyone in the audience has got the message, because without the
anchor of real events holding it in place, so much of the film seems too
incredible to be true. The entire narrative thrust of the picture is built upon
characters making inexplicably stupid decisions and consistently proving
themselves to be remarkably gullible and open to suggestion, and if Compliance
were a fictional film I'd be undoubtedly chastising the screenwriter for such
flaws. That "true story" disclaimer is essentially Zobel's "Get
Out of Jail Free" card.
The thing is, there's a difference between believing what
you seen because you know the story is true and believing what you see because
of the convincing way it is presented, and I'm not sure that Zobel pulls off
the second part of that equation. The plot concerns Becky (Dreama Walker) a perky
and likable young woman working behind the counter at a nondescript fast-food
restaurant in Ohio. She is taken to an office at the back of the shop by her manager Sandra (Ann Dowd), who tells says
that she has a police officer on the phone, and that Becky has been accused of
theft by a customer. Shocked and
confused, Becky is willing to turn out her pockets and empty her purse to help
clear her name, but the cop on the line remains unconvinced by her pleas of
innocence, and he orders Sandra to strip-search her.
It's that this point that you have to remind yourself that
an incident like this really did take place, because as you watch the drama
unfold onscreen it seems impossible to swallow. Sandra, blossoming under the
sense of authority bestowed on her by "Officer Daniels", asks Becky to strip
while another female employee enters the room to act as witness. It's a very difficult scene to watch, with the discomfort of all three women being palpable
as Becky removes her clothes and Sandra checks them, before the naked and scared
girl is handed an apron to partially cover herself. Things escalate
dramatically from here, with various male characters being introduced to watch
over Becky and being asked to commit increasingly invasive and humiliating
acts. At no point does anyone question or challenge the disembodied voice on
the end of the phone.
There are potentially some fascinating insights to be
gleaned from the way people willingly submit to authority figures in situations
like this (the Stanford Prison Experiment comes to mind), but Compliance is not
the film to do it. The picture is staged in a manner that simply shows and
tells us what took place, with Zobel focusing his attentions on maintaining
tension and putting us audience members in an unpleasantly voyeuristic
position. He does this effectively, but I never felt the gut-wrenching emotional
pull that he was clearly going for, even though all of the actors perform commendably well in their thinly sketched and ultimately passive roles. I think
one of Zobel's key errors early on is to reveal the caller (Pat Healy),
therefore removing any lingering sense of mystery around the officer's identity
and simply turning the film into a repetitive series of scenes in which people
are prompted to do things to Becky while she sits there and takes it.
It becomes a bit of a drag. Instead of wondering what we would
do in such a situation – the goal of most button-pushing dramas like this – we just
sit there marvelling at the witlessness of these people. Compliance is a solid
piece of filmmaking that exerts a queasy fascination simply because of the
nature of the story it tells, but it is a failure of storytelling; it is not
simply enough to rehash the facts, you need to give us a reason to invest our
time in this picture. If Compliance doesn't hit you on an emotional level then
there's nothing else to take away from the film, and the final twenty minutes
is particularly deflating, as whatever dramatic tension it may have possessed dissipates
in a weak, unfocused finale that offers no conclusions on the incident. "When
they told you that you had to take your clothes off, is there a reason you
didn't just say no?" a real police officer asks towards the end as he
interviews Becky. "I don't know" she replies, "I just knew it was
going to happen." That's the only occasion in Compliance when somebody
asks why, and it's not really enough.