The Big Picture
Compliance is a difficult and unpleasant film that explores the psychology behind authority figures manipulating people into doing horrible things. The movie is based on a real-life crime that occurred at a McDonald’s in Kentucky in 2004, where a manager and her fiancé were convinced by a prank caller to sexually assault an employee. While the film provokes an emotional response and raises difficult questions, it falls short in its portrayal of the power dynamics and fails to fully capture the true horror of the situation.
Craig Zobel’s 2012 thriller Compliance does not receive enough recognition for being difficult to watch. It’s currently available to stream on Max, but you might find yourself pausing it every few minutes for a break from its relentlessly unpleasant story. The film narrates the events of a day in a fast-food franchise. Early in the morning, Sandra, the restaurant’s manager, receives a phone call from a man impersonating a police officer, who falsely accuses Becky, one of her employees, of committing a crime. Over a few hours, a character who’s initially referred to as Officer Daniels (Pat Healy) convinces Sandra (Ann Dowd) to inflict a series of punishments on Becky, which eventually crosses the line into sexual assault. Disturbingly, though the characters in Compliance are fictional, the film is based on nearly identical crimes that occurred at a McDonald’s in Kentucky in 2004.
Compliance
A normal Friday service at a fast food restaurant becomes interrupted by a police officer who claims an employee stole from a customer, but something more sinister is going on.
Release Date January 21, 2012
Rating R
Runtime 90 minutes
Genres Crime , Documentary , Drama , Mystery , Thriller
What Happens in the Movie ‘Compliance’?
Compliance debuted at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it was met with a heated response, including charges that it had made “violence against women entertaining” from the audience at its premiere. It’s not hard to see why the audience might have felt provoked. It was a period when indie films were going through a fascination with unethical psychological experiments. Experimenter, about the radical psychological experiments of Stanley Milgram, and The Stanford Prison Experiment, about the famous experiment in which student subjects were assigned the roles of prisoner and guard, both explored authority figures who were able to manipulate people into doing horrible things. These two twin films both premiered at Sundance in 2015. Compliance, which explores similar topics in the context of a real-life crime, is their precursor.
The story begins with a glimpse at a routine day at an unnamed fast food franchise. Sandra begins her day by being yelled at by her supplier because she’s allowed her restaurant to run out of bacon – a result of one of her employees leaving the freezer open overnight. Later, as Sandra delivers the morning’s assignments, you get a sense of what kind of boss she is. She’s driven by anxiety over being punished by her own regional manager and communicates that anxiety to her staff. Even though she manages her store without any unneeded cruelty, she’s alienated from her much younger employees by her role as an authority figure. Her attempt to join in with two of her cashiers, Becky (Dreama Walker) and Marti (Ashlie Atkinson), as they gossip about their sex lives, falls flat. She’s above but apart from her co-workers – which makes her both effective and unhappy.
This brief prologue sets up the horrific events that are yet to occur. The store receives a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer. The man, whose real name we never learn, claims to be a police officer named “Officer Daniels.” He tells her that he’s received a report that one of her employees has stolen money from a customer and that her regional supervisor – whose exact name he has looked up – has asked for Sandra to comply with an investigation. Daniels asks her if she has an employee who is young and blonde. Sandra suggests that he might mean Becky, at which point Daniels jumps on the information she has unwittingly fed him. Daniels isn’t a particularly convincing con artist, but Sandra falls for it.
Daniels claims that a customer has accused Becky of stealing money out of her purse and that his “surveillance unit” has it on tape. He has Sandra check Becky’s purse, and then her pockets, and then demands that Becky be strip searched. Sandra resists at first, but Daniels presents this as the “humane” alternative for Becky, which will spare her the trouble of being arrested, and then has Sandra take Becky’s clothes into her car. When Becky’s co-workers refuse to be deputized to “stand guard” over her, Daniels has Sandra call her fiancé, Van (Bill Camp) to help keep Becky imprisoned in the restaurant’s storage room.
Over this time, Sandra’s initial compassion for Becky begins to sour. Sandra begins responding to the Caller’s praise of the job she is doing torturing Becky, and to think of herself as something like a cop. She develops contempt for Becky, whose guilt she begins taking for granted. This evokes what happened during the Stanford Prison Experiment when the students assigned the role of “guard” began to literally abuse those who were assigned the role of “prisoner.”
Daniels begins testing the limits of how far Sandra and Van are willing to go. While at first, he has a convoluted crime narrative to explain why all of these steps are necessary, eventually, he realizes he can just tell Sandra and Van to do anything to Becky because she’s been uncooperative and needs to be disciplined. Without Sandra’s knowledge, Van is convinced to spank Becky, and, finally, to rape her. Only after this does a phone call to the regional manager reveal that he had never heard of “Officer Daniels” and was never informed of a theft. After the fraud is revealed, the last minutes of the film briefly explore the psychological aftermath of the sexual assault and the shortcomings of the legal system.
Related Dreama Walker Talks COMPLIANCE, Her Surprise at the Controversy, and DON’T TRUST THE B IN APARTMENT 23 Dreama Walker Talks COMPLIANCE, Surprise at the Controversy, and DON’T TRUST THE B IN APARTMENT 23. Ann Dowd co-stars in Craig Zobel’s COMPLIANCE.
How Much of ‘Compliance’ is Based on a True Story?
Watching Compliance is a nightmare experience. It’s signaled to the audience almost immediately that the Caller is a fraud, but the audience must watch with horror as Sandra, Van, and Becky herself are taken in by this scam. It’s very tempting to believe that no one would behave this way in real life. However, the story is fairly faithful in its retelling of an event that took place in 2004, at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky. It was the latest in a series of dozens of such hoax phone calls, stretching back to the 1990s.
As in Compliance, a caller contacted a McDonald’s, identified himself as “Officer Scott,” and fed the assistant manager, Donna Jean Summers, a vague description of a female employee who was suspected of theft. Summers then identified Louise Ogborn, one of her cashiers, as the best fit for that description. After Ogborn was brought into the back room of the restaurant, the crime escalated in much the same way as it proceeds in the movie. After a strip search, the manager brought in her fiancé, Walter Wes Nix, Jr., to help keep an eye on Ogborn while Summers managed the restaurant. While Nix and Ogborn were alone, the caller gave Nix instructions to sexually abuse her in a variety of ways, which Nix complied with. As in the film, the events were recorded on CCTV cameras.
Though similar hoax calls had been made to dozens of stores and fast-food franchises for years, this incident brought the pattern to the attention of the police. The investigation was led by a rookie detective in Mount Washington, who discovered the pattern of hoax calls through a Google search. The details of this investigation are the subject of the Netflix true-crime documentary Don’t Pick Up the Phone. By obtaining security camera footage of a suspect buying the prepaid phone cards that were used in the hoax calls, the investigation zeroed in on a suspect: David Stewart, a part-time prison guard who lived in Florida, and who had applied to be a police officer several times. Stewart was arrested and brought to Kentucky to stand trial. In the end, Nix spent several years in jail for his role in the sexual assault, while Summers received a year of probation. Both Ogborn and Stewart were able to successfully sue McDonald’s, which had failed to instruct their in-store employees about the pattern of hoax calls. Stewart was acquitted of the charges against him. However, after his trial, the calls stopped.
‘Compliance’ Inspires a Debate Among Its Viewers
image via Max
As soon as the story about the fast food hoax calls broke, people were forced to ask themselves how these store managers could comply with instructions that were so clearly inappropriate. The documentary Don’t Pick Up the Phone collects firsthand theories from those close to the case. The suspect had been rehearsing his impersonation for many years, while his targets were always caught off guard. Summers defended her behavior by explaining, “When I asked him questions… he always had an answer.” In Compliance, Sandra quotes this line exactly. However, there are unique parts of Zobel’s answer to the question (as he phrased it) “What part of human nature lets this happen?”
Specifically, the film suggests that the American workplace trains us to blindly obey authority. Sandra lives in fear of customers, and of her regional supervisors. The two forces even blend together: Sandra spends the first half of the movie warning her staff that they might be visited by a “secret shopper,” an undercover customer sent by corporate to test the restaurant’s service. Given the chance to finally be on the other side of the power imbalance, Sandra treats Becky the way she feels she has been treated. Numerous close-ups of restaurant equipment suggest that Zobel intends Compliance as a story about the nature of work.
This ends up being a glib reduction. Zobel, who also wrote the script, gives his characters very little biographical information to work with. Additionally, they aren’t directed with much precision, although he has a cast of talented actors who have been better elsewhere. Zobel himself directed both Down and Camp to great effect in The Leftovers’ magnificent episode, “International Assassin.” The story includes side characters who, somewhat nobly, refuse to participate in Becky’s abuse. But it still feels as if Zobel’s explanation for why Sandra is so easily convinced to pollute her entire life is simply that “she works in a fast food restaurant.”
Certain details that the film changes from the original story cloud the film’s message. While the likely perpetrator of the hoax calls was law-enforcement adjacent, in Compliance the culprit turns out to be a white-collar suburbanite, removing an important element of the story as it occurred. The most questionable decision is the direction of Walker’s performance as Becky. While Ogborn has said that she cried through most of her ordeal, and was afraid for her life, Becky is consistently defiant and strong. This choice has the effect of blurring the power imbalance between Becky and Sandra, softening Sandra’s complicity, and even shifting some of the burden onto Becky for her own abuse. Though the film undeniably provokes an emotional response and poses difficult questions, it does seem like Zobel flinched from the implications of this story, and failed to honor it. Stories like this force us to ask ourselves how we would participate in a situation like this one. Would we stand up for the powerless or go along with the tyrant? Zobel seems to suggest that, of course, we’d comply: because so would anyone. Beneath the cynicism, this is a safe answer.
Compliance is currently streaming on Max.
Stream Compliance on Max