A True Story:
A police officer calls a fast food restaurant and tell the manager that a young employee has stolen from the register. The caller tells the manager to strip search the employee and leave her naked in the storage room and because the caller says he’s a cop, the manager complies.

And the entire event was caught on the restaurant’s closed circuit camera system.

Where do we draw the line with authority? At what point do we just follow along blindly? When should common sense and reason take over? And doesn’t just following orders feel good?

The event is the basis for the movie Compliance staring Dreama Walker from ABC’s Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apt 23 and Ann Dowd, most recently a nun on Louie. The film got a lot of press at Sundance, a lot of divisive press.

From the trailer this looks like a true horror film, not one with imaginary monsters but the very ordinary monsters that we all are. It is never easy to see how quickly an essentially good person can do something so clearly wrong, all the while thinking it’s right. How long would it take any of us before we realized the truth?