Early 2025 found the US federal government targeting universities for their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, threatening more than 50 of those institutions with the withholding of federal funds if they did not comply. Only a handful of these refused to cave to this demand, the most high-profile being Harvard. More recently, the president tried the carrot instead of the stick, asking nine universities to sign a compact for them to receive “significant funding and other benefits” in trade for agreeing to certain terms. MIT essentially told him to stuff it. I have a great deal of respect for that institution.
I felt a great deal of frustration watching 2012’s Compliance, given how the manager and employees of a fast food restaurant so immediately and completely acquiesce to the demands of a caller who claims to be a police officer investigating a cashier who supposedly stole money from a woman’s purse. Given how frequently people are conned by scammers, what happens at first isn’t too surprising. Supposedly, this is based on a series of true occurrences of such calls, yet I refuse to believe anybody in those situations would let things go as far as things do here. Maybe some of those incidents went to the extremities we see here, but it is the movie’s job to convince me of that feasibility. In that regard, it failed.
For one thing, this plays out over the course of an entire day and into the night before anybody challenges the caller. It will be revealed at about the midpoint of the runtime that the caller, Pat Healy, is not an officer, which was a surprise in no way whatsoever. Even with his endless threats of jailtime, it is baffling nobody says at any point, “Fine, come on down here”. Nobody thinks to call the police to confirm the identity of the caller. Nobody calls or asks to speak to the district manager who is supposedly on the “other line” the entire time. For a whole fucking day.
That day began with manager Ann Dowd getting berated by a delivery guy who had to bring an emergency order after somebody left the freezer door open the night before. Dowd is a nervous kind of person, though she appears to be a generally kind one. In a conversation she has with her subordinates, she claims to have a fiancée—well, of course, he hasn’t proposed yet, but she is insistent he will. I would have been willing to bet large amounts of money no such man existed, yet there is Stephen Payne, a soft-spoken everyman who will also be roped into this scheme that unfolds.
Even from the first few minutes of his phone call, you may be screaming at the screen as I was, as if the characters can hear the audience. In this regard, it is an effective picture. You can tell how Healy is fishing for information, one aspect of his ruse which rang all too unfortunately true. He doesn’t even know the name of the accused, just prompting Dowd with, “that girl working at the front counter.” She replies, “You mean Becky?” My hand hit my forehead hard enough to leave a red mark.
Dreama Walker is Becky. Everything about her says she will be in jobs like this for the rest of her life, but she doesn’t appear to be anybody with criminal tendencies. Alas, she endures, with little to no resistance, one humiliation after another over the course of that day. Early on, she is made to take off all her clothes, with her wearing an apron for the majority of the runtime. One person is asked to describe Walker’s nipples, so to as to corroborate the description of her by the accused, as if she was topless when the allegedly theft occurred. The abuse she experiences culminates in her being sexually assaulted.
Now, I want you to imagine how, exactly. somebody over the phone could convince otherwise decent people to do these things, especially the last of those. I have seen the movie and I still don’t believe some of them, especially the assault, are possible. There are suggestions at least one of the people victimizing her is actually releasing their own suppressed urges. While Compliance is a very apt title, I think Corruption may be a good alternate, as that is what Healy is doing to those he is coercing. And, by willingly watching this, I feel the audience is also debased. I will concede I almost bailed about two-thirds of the way through the runtime, and only stuck it out so I will never have to speculate how the movie might have ended.
As much as I hated the movie, Compliance does have a few valuable lessons to impart. The main one I gleaned from it was how the caller puts themselves in a position of superiority by demanding those who do offer any resistance address him as “sir”. He gets one person to apologize for swearing. That’s the problem with not challenging authority—as soon as you agree to converse on their terms, one has already started to submit to them. Anytime a person fights, they might lose, but the important thing is to fight back. Otherwise, you have already lost.
Dir: Craig Zobel
Starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healty
Watched on Magnolia blu-ray