When a prank caller convinces a fast food restaurant manager to interrogate an innocent young employee, no-one is left unharmed. Based on true events.
A few moments spent researching the real-life case reveals information much more interesting that the film actually contains; by choosing to focus only on the initial incident, Zobel’s film shocks, but leaves the viewer to uncover the real story for themselves.
A thought-provoking drama-thriller which asks questions about blindly following orders, Compliance contains a few potent moments, but is let down by a feeling of implausibility. Now go and get your kit off, the police are on their way.
The one indisputable fact is that this is a squirmy watch – but of course, it is supposed to be.
The incredibility of what transpires is also part of what makes Compliance so compelling in the end, and Zobel is canny enough to gradually intensify the level of discomfort to ensure the characters’ increasing irrationality feels honest in the situation, regardless of how out-of-whack it seems from a distance.
It is a cold, hard, shrewd film: satire with a drop of cyanide.
Screenings at Sundance and since have been peppered with walkouts, which have been unreflectingly held up by Compliance’s fans as evidence of its psyche-shattering power. Instead, I suspect it comes down to a simpler, but equally visceral response: there’s not much fun to be had in watching a young woman being browbeaten into taking her clothes off.
Craig Zobel's drama, allegedly "inspired by true events", is a banal nightmare about coercion and gullibility.
The film ultimately feels exploitative, especially in its schematic selectiveness about what to show or not.
An uncomfortable, provocative little drama that really gets under the skin and will not be for all tastes.
Provocative but true.
Zobel lays bare the mechanics of his own manipulations...and defies us, uneasily, to laugh at a divided society’s sick joke.
Compliance is a cunning and darkly funny conman movie, but it's also a poignant character study.
Compliance is a disturbing, exciting and instructive film about matters we should all be prepared to face.
Compliance: wound you strip-search a colleague if the police ordered you to?
Craig Zobel: Compliance and the Milgram Test
Cameo, Edinburgh from Friday March 22, 2013, until Thursday April 4, 2013. More info: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/
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