London Film Festival review - Compliance

Truth really is so much stranger than fiction. While there have been films centring on a menacing phone call before, no Hollywood screenwriter would have come up with the plot of Compliance off the top of their head, it is just too outlandish.  These events happened in real life, making this low-budget indie thriller into an examination of the very nature of free will.

The film takes place over a day at a branch of the Chick-Wich fast food chain. Manger Sandra (Ann Dowd, the spitting image of Lisa Dingle from Emmerdale) is having a bad day because someone left the freezer door open overnight. But it is about to get worse. A policeman (Pat Healy) rings the office and tells her that one of her employees, Becky (Dreama Walker), has stolen money from a customer. This sparks off a chain of events which I won’t spoil, but suffice it to say that are as disturbing as they are unbelievable.

The cinematography is plain and to the point, bathing the claustrophobic sets in a sickly beige light which perfectly suits the events. All the performances are excellent and the characters feel real. Dowd walks the thin line between villain and object of pity well, and Walker puts her wide eyes to good use. I particularly liked Ashlie Atkins as Marti the shift supervisor, part of the staff who gave the whole thing a realistic workplace vibe.

Compliance is a film which asks us how much power we give to authority, how much we are willing to ignore for an easy life, and who amongst us will stand up and say “no”. To me it had echoes of the Holocaust, but interestingly at the LFF screening, a lot of the questions centred on America (both about the perceived passivity of its people and – for reasons I didn’t fully understand, other than some people see Iraq everywhere – its foreign policy). The director Craig Zobel explained that everywhere he showed the film people said “That could never happen here!” including in America, so nationality is probably a red herring. You would hope that most people would be more questioning than the characters in the film, but it only needed a few people for it to happen.

This is an uncomfortable watch, but one that will definitely spark a debate with your friends.