All Critics (77) | Top Critics (30) | Fresh (70) | Rotten (7)
This is one insistent film, more evocative of human behavior than movies that take fewer risks ever could be.
Like a John Hughes movie hijacked by Roman Polanski, this troubling indie effort lays bare the sadomasochism of the American workplace.
Zobel, a second-time feature filmmaker, has put together a skillful, sympathetic but unsparing re-enactment of a small-scale atrocity, and his cast plays it out with natural, understated performances.
Zobel's masterful direction and screenplay heighten the distress of authority figures possessing unseen persuasion over naive employees, exposing a disturbing and haunting look at what some workers are willing to do in order to follow orders.
This is a well-made film, with plausible performances by all the leads, especially Ann Dowd. We feel we know people like this.
A thriller that permits you to stay two or three steps ahead of it. It's a film that makes you yell at the screen, to shout "Come ON!" at many a moment that seems to defy credulity.
There's a humanity here, even for the restaurant manager. But that still doesn't make "Compliance" easy to ingest.
... a sadomasochistic mind-trip ... It has the lingering impact of a gruesome freeway pileup ? you don't want to look, but you can't help yourself.
Compliance will leave you shocked and offended, but it misses out on any opportunity to be anything outside of a dramatization.
Compliance is a difficult film to watch -- walkouts have been reported at more than one screening -- but it's also a calculating and intimate deconstruction of the greater social ills that our fast-food nation faces as a whole.
This psychodrama of ill-advised behavior may well leave you feeling dirty...for what you've watched helplessly and perhaps for what you've countenanced as an American citizen.
So long as you can tolerate the frustration it fosters, it's hard not to appreciate such intelligent provocation.
Perhaps the most disturbing movie of the year. Not a horror film, but given that we can't excuse the behavior as belonging to illegal aliens or felons eluding of the law ... maybe it's a new strain of horror after all.
For once, the title card "Based on true events" is not some cheap gimmick to lend a story importance; it is a despondent cry of shock, disbelief, and, above all, outrage.
Bravely uncomfortable and sure to inspire heated post-movie (and likely mid-movie) conversation, Compliance is haunting, positively enraging when it sinks in that this was no nightmare, but a reality.
A disturbing, fact-based look at the ways in which people can be bullied into bowing to the demands of authority figures.
We think we're more world-wise than these people and that this could never happen and then Zobel brilliantly forces us to come to terms with those judgments.
Shows good intentions gone bad (and bad intentions gone horrible), with characters persuaded to bite off inch by inch until an entire yard is gone.
A film designed to provoke social as well as cinematic comment.
The intimate setting ratchets up the suspense without turning exploitative.
You'll spend the bulk of the film squirming in your seat.
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