90% Compliance

All Critics (88) | Top Critics (31) | Fresh (79) | Rotten (9)

The point of Compliance, which caused walkouts and shouting matches when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is how we are programmed to do things that go against our natural instincts as long as we believe we have the law on our side.

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.

I admire the workings of the movie, in the same cool way I might regard a machine gun as a work of art ...

Compliance strips bare the fallacy of equivalent free will. It gets under one's skin in a manner few films do, but sticks in one's head the same way all great ones do.

Without a single bullet in sight, Craig Zobel has crafted an ingenious, dizzying conversation piece of a thriller.

About as far from an easy watch as you could imagine, Compliance is a seedy little story that you'll wind up watching between the cracks in your fingers.

Morally complex look at human behavior leaves you shaking your head in disbelief

Dowd's performance -- showing Sandra's eagerness to please the "cop" and her hesitancy to follow orders -- burns in the mind long after the movie's over.

One of the most deeply disturbing movies of recent vintage.

There's the adage that life is nasty, brutish and short. It's even worse when you're half-naked and locked in a supply room with your boss.

Its skillfully constructed scene-setting montages, its fraught, gliding camera moves and attractive compositions seem judgmental, suggesting the filmmakers are superior to and more sensitive, certainly, than the characters.

'Compliance' takes an extremely unpleasant and nauseating experience for everyone involved and puts this masterful spin on it to make it not only watchable, but a really solid piece of film overall.

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.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/compliance_2012/

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