Compliance (2012)

It is a mad busy day at a branch of a fast food chain. The day outlook seems to be a bit grim. Dificulties are mounting up. The previous night, someone left the refrigerator door open. Some food have got rotten, and there will be problems to serve some orders. Also, problems aside, and beyond some artificial friendliness, staff members do not appear to get along extremely well.

To make things a bit more confusing, suddenly there is a phone call asking for the branch manager. Turns out to be a police officer, coming up with a strange accusation: a customer claims that money has been stolen from their purse, that same morning at the branch. The officer also reveals the existence of some amount of evidence for the crime. As a result, one of the staff members, 19 year-old Becky, is accused by the officer on the phone. She is drawn aside. And the nightmare begins.

Compliance (Craig Zobel, 2012) is true psychological horror. Horror might arise from a life-threatening menace, but more frequently it simply arises from trouble (or complete impossibility) to understand exactly what is going on, not in the world as a whole, but in our personal micro-world. Horror arises from the troubles we all have understanding the others (and ourselves), their deep pshycology and reasoning, their actual motivations, the meaning of their actions. To some extent, all we are familiar with is nothing but a handful of masks we see around us, acting in a way whose actual purpose we dont completely grasp, or not at all. We just have verbalized messages directed at us or at the others, along with some ambiguous body language clues. All to just try figure out a little what the mess is about.

We usually speak of the existence of kafkaesque situations in our ordinary life. That does not imply any event of fantastic nature. Just ordinary stuff that actually happens to us and quite often, becoming some sort of psychological horror. Kafkaesque is an used-up term expressing a world of weird, obscure (somewhat laughable) unfathomable situations of personal alienation. But that is actually our real world, too: one of confusion and misunderstandings in the everyday interaction between impenetrable psychologies. And it becomes incresingly sinister and hilarious -more kafkaesque- as our civilization goes on gaining more and more complexity. Our brains are in some way limited, there is a limit to the complexity we can cope with. The irony is that we now have better tools than ever before to communicate, to expand ourselves, but most times they are just technological projections of our inner chaos.

Now add evil to this equation. Add voluntary confusion and misunderstanding, add the actual intention to create pain, to create confusion. Then you have the full picture. At some point the whole thing might ignite, and unexpectedly we find ourselves confronted with perfectely exposed accusations in a polite articulate manner which we simply cannot understand: we find ourselves in the position of a well known Kafka character. Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. We simply fail to figure out what has happened. How it is the rest of the world seems to have converged into action against us.

And there is, all of a sudden, the horror. Compliance happens in day light in an ordinary work environment, with ordinary characters, none of them specially evil, o not at all. Yet I found it one of the most frightening movies I have seen in recent times.