Don't Trust the B**** from the Other Line

Compliance

*** out of ****

Directed by: Craig Zobel

Starring: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Bill Camp and Philip Ettinger

Running time: 91 minutes

Compliance is a tense, terse drama that beckons the audience to ponder how they would react to the onscreen events if they were present in the circumstances of the story. At many moments throughout my screening, I coughed out some nervous laughter, trying to figure out whether the proceedings – based off shocking true events – were worthy of a laugh, a gasp or a combination of the two. The story may be sickening, but it is told with expert performances and direction.

The bulk of the film takes place behind the back counter of a fast food eatery on a busy Friday evening. Stressed out middle-aged manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) gets a phone call from a police officer explaining that one of her employees, a pert, unblemished teen named Becky (Dreama Walker), stole money from a customer that afternoon.

The officer tells Sandra to detain Becky until the police can come and investigate. Sandra obeys the officer, even when he summons her to check Becky’s purse and pockets for the allegedly stolen cash. Then, he tells Sandra to perform a strip search. Although both women are uncomfortable with this demand, the officer explains that the flip side would be to jail Becky until the police could check for themselves.

The tension quickly escalates as Sandra obeys the man’s direction without much discretion of her own. Halfway through Compliance, as the officer’s demands veer to the queasy side, we get a face to match the voice on the phone. It turns out that the man is not a police officer but an everyman (Pat Healy) in a nice home who is using a calling card as a means for a humiliating crank call.

As the scenes move between his comfy home and the stuffy confines of Sandra’s office, there is a disorienting (yet effective) juxtaposition between the caller’s joking smile and the victim’s uncomfortable submission.

The situation in the film — believe it or not – is closely based on a crank call to a Kentucky McDonald’s location in 2004. In fact, that horror story was actually more sordid and sexually degrading than the acts depicted toward the end of Compliance, which are implied or blurred out. (The truth, it turns out, is not stranger than the fiction, but is just as sickening.)

Compliance is a pressure-cooker full of arresting performances, most notably from Dowd and Walker. In the first half, before showing the man behind the curtain, Zobel contends with lingering reaction shots on his two antagonizing females. Dowd’s nuanced but troubled shifts between sternness and sympathy is as assured as Walker’s slow interior descent into submission.

Zobel has mined terrific gold from his leading actresses, although he is a tad clunky as a storyteller. To segue from scene to scene, he awkwardly puts in exterior shots of the restaurant parking lot and close-ups of frying chicken fillets, One nighttime scene shot in broad daylight also sticks out like a burnt McNugget.

Regardless, he keeps the tension impalpable and the proceedings unpredictable. Compliance stirred up much discussion at its Sundance debut earlier this year, and rightly so: it’s a film worth talking about, a sharp, slim and sociologically fascinating dissection of power and control.