I’ve been getting quite a few movie recommendations from my Grampy recently. He’s a bigger movie fan than I am (perhaps we should get him to guest post) and he’s much harsher with his judgements too! Hi Grampy, if you’re reading! At the Sunday dinner table he told me about a dark themed movie set in a fast food restaurant, and after pondering it for a while, he told me it was called Coercion, and that the little I knew about it, the better.
Fab. That went straight on the must watch list, so I hunted it down the other day. Only my search for Coercion only found me an unreleased terrorist movie coming out next year, and two shorts, one a crime and the other sci-fi. Nothing mentioning a fast food restaurant! A more thorough search led me to find a post titled ‘Compliance (2012), This Year’s Most Controversial Film’. Plus, a mention of fast food! Huzzah! No thanks there Grampy!
So, here’s what I can tell you about Compliance. On a Friday night, the busiest night of the week for this restaurant, the manager gets a call from the police informing her that one of her employees has stolen cash from a customer’s purse, and the manager is required to interrogate and search her in a bid to find the stolen money.
Honestly, that’s all you need to know. There’s no great plot twist here, and it’s based on a true life story anyway, but an IMDB search will tell you more than I have, so take caution. All I would warn you is this. This film is dark. It’s not a comfortable watch at all, but from a psychological point of view, it’s really quite amazing what lengths people will go to when being told to comply by an authoritative figure.
As it’s such a low budget movie, there are no Hollywood faces here, in fact every face was new to me other than Becky’s (Dreama Walker, who I know from Gossip Girl), but I thought the cast did a fantastic job with such difficult material. I’ve never seen a movie quite like it before, and even now I still can’t believe that everything really happened out here in the real world. (Edit: Scrap that, I've just read through the rest of the cast's Filmography, I take it all back!)
Who can you trust?!
