In a mid-America fast-food outpost, restaurant manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) is having a bad night even before the phone call comes. Police officer Daniels (Pat Healy), as he identifies himself, claims pretty teenage counter girl Becky (Dreama Walker) was seen stealing money from a purse.
He instructs Sandra to take Becky into a storage closet and have Becky strip. He then uses the phone to instruct everyone — Sandra, Becky, co-workers, even Sandra’s fiancé — to pile on the humiliation, until an actual sexual assault happens.
“Officer Daniels” is shown to be a prank caller of astonishing viciousness. Worse, the movie is based on a string of true incidents. By the time the caller rebukes Becky for not addressing him as “sir,” some may feel the urge to put a foot through a theater seat.
But the controversy-baiting “Compliance,” while relentlessly grim and a test of audience endurance, is also courageous. It’s a highly political work about how some people can be made to do vile things just for the wispiest promise that the powers above will go a little bit easier on them.
It’s also remarkable to find a filmmaker willing to show the American deification of uniforms as so extreme that we’ll kowtow to anyone who so much as claims to be wearing one.
The worst acts are merely suggested, and there’s not one lewd or exploitative shot — a vital consideration in a film about a rape. And director Craig Zobel avoids all condescension toward the employees and the customers, though he does, in the sole instances of real moralizing, show the prank caller in some “banality of evil” scenes.
Zobel treats the restaurant workers’ anxieties with deep seriousness. Sandra is terrified of what late middle age is doing to her career prospects; Becky fears damaging her record in a way she’ll never live down.
And the film suggests Becky and Sandra are right. Those aren’t possibilities; in 2012 America, they’re near-certainties.
The actors in “Compliance’’ perform with thorough and chilling sincerity. To paraphrase Jean Renoir’s most famous line, the workers have their reasons.
They cling to them, even in the aftermath: “I was very stressed, and we were very busy,” says Sandra.