Monday 18 March 2013

"...definitely not a chance to have a guilty wee perv over the perky blonde from Don’t Trust The B**** In Apartment 23 getting nekkid and being sexually humiliated and abused" - Compliance


Compliance

The kind of controversy-courting flick that trumpets its torn-from-the-headlines “Based on a true story” credentials, inspiring walk-outs at film festivals while normally being met with a disinterested “Meh…” by audiences, Compliance is the latest film to wheel out those creaky old classics the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment to illustrate the banality of evil and the lengths we’ll go to in order to obey an authority figure who gives us permission to act against our own personal conscience.  And it’s definitely not a chance to have a guilty wee perv over the perky blonde from Don’t Trust The B**** In Apartment 23 getting nekkid and being sexually humiliated and abused.  No siree Bob, nothing could be further from our minds!

Based on not one but over 70 true stories across the continental United States, which kinda makes you wonder just how gullible (or, more disturbingly, how eager) our colonial cousins are, Compliance sees harried, highly-strung fast-food restaurant manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) receive a phone call from an ‘Officer’ Daniels (Pat Healy) who claims that one of Sandra’s employees, the pretty, young checkout girl Becky (the aforementioned perky blonde Dreama Walker from Don’t Trust The B**** In Apartment 23) is guilty of theft and that Sandra should detain and strip search the girl until he can get there to arrest her. 

Held prisoner in the restaurant storage room Sandra, the restaurant’s other employees and Sandra’s squiffy boyfriend act as proxies for the prank caller as the frightened, naïve, compliant Becky is subjected to an escalating series of dehumanising humiliations on his orders, eventually culminating in a sexual assault.

Starkly shot and boasting good performances from all the principals, writer/director Zobel stretches a pretty thin scenario until our suspension of disbelief snaps.  It’s not that the implications of what he’s showing us aren’t chilling and squirm-inducingly uncomfortable it’s just that the film has little to say beyond “YOU’RE ALL JUST SHEEPLE!  EVERY ONE OF YOU WOULD DO THIS GIVEN HALF A CHANCE!”  No, we wouldn’t.  It takes a special kind of gullibility.  Possibly an American gullibility.  But even then, most people would find it a mite suspicious, certainly unorthodox, if a policeman told them to search a suspected thief by putting their wee-wee in her mouth.  Just saying. 

Cynically, Compliance exploits its audience while indulging our scopophilia; as much as we sympathise with Becky and are repulsed by her ordeal, we want to see what she goes through.  We’re culpable in her abuse because while the film doesn’t show us anything particularly horrifying or shocking, (make no mistake, you’re not watching Salò here) we want to be horrified, we want to be shocked.  And, if we’re honest, we want to see just how perky the perky blonde from Don’t Trust The B**** In Apartment 23 is. Compliance is a piece of cool manipulation, a film that’s based around the humiliation, subjugation and sexual assault of an attractive young woman and has little to offer beyond that.  And while the events depicted in the film are suggested by truth, things only escalated as far as they did in one documented case.  ONE!  And that was in Kentucky where they still think the telephone is the Devil’s Work.  That means that in pretty much every instance the victims smelt a rat and called a halt to the ordeal before things escalated out of control. 

If Compliance teaches us anything, it’s not that most of us are sheep who will mindlessly, unquestioningly follow orders.  It’s that (***minor spoiler alert***) if you’re going to make crank calls, DON’T DO IT FROM YOUR OWN HOUSE!  That’s not really a good enough reason to retread an old episode of Law & Order: SVU 

David Watson


Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genres:
Crime, Drama, Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 30 minutes
Certificate:
15
UK Release Date:
Friday 22nd March 2013
Rating:
2/5

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