Compliance

Bluesky

Which part of Kyle Mangione-Smith’s Fantastic Fest contribution you find most sinister will likely depend on your personal experience of late stage capitalism and the more explicitly brutal movements seeking to follow in its wake. Presented as found footage from a variety of sources, it begins with a distressing call to emergency services, a woman reporting that she has been raped whilst staying in a residence managed by the company Uvisit. Enter Sam (Megan Wilcox), sent by the company to pick up the distressed woman from hospital, take her to new accommodation and ensure that her immediate needs are met. Sam also has some papers for the woman to sign.

It’s not a job that Sam is altogether comfortable with. She still describes herself as a social worker, which is what she did before. Her boss reminds her that she’s now in PR, and needs to remember different priorities. That’s particularly important at the moment, when the company is just four days out from what could be a landmark deal. She doesn’t want to hurt a vulnerable woman, but she has a nice apartment and she just bought a Tesla car and she doesn’t know how she can keep up the payments if she loses this job. So she drinks, which she hasn’t done for a while, telling a friend and herself that she can handle it now. And late at night, after a drunken fall, she catches sight of one of the little cameras that has been watching her from a corner of her living room.

The initial moral dilemma here offers plentiful room for exploration, and might easily have sufficed to fill out a film by itself, but here it is only the opening gambit in a work which swiftly becomes more complicated, delighting in pulling the rug from under its heroine’s feet. Sam’s efforts to find a way of continuing to perceive herself as a good person, together with her secret longing to be seen as special, as unusually clever or talented, make her an easy target for exploitation. Her easy outrage and desire to challenge and resist see her drawn into a scheme whose upshot may be quite at odds with her values, and entail a very high personal cost. There are echoes of Wall Street here, but much more explicitly brutal, in a world in which outrage is easily commodified and a skilled online media operator can whip up a mob at very short notice.

The danger with a film structured like this is that, just like the various real and sincerely imagined conspiracies on which it is based, it can easily spiral off into paranoid fantasy. It has a lot of ideas but, in order to keep up momentum, succumbs to pressure to continually up the ante, and ends up going a bit MK Ultra – never a flattering look. Mangione-Smith handles it well through most of the running time, however, and is particularly successful at telling the story dynamically without compromising the found footage approach, resulting in something that looks like a carefully compiled documentary or collection of evidence. He also does a good job of constructing a story with a significant element of online communication without spending much time pointing the camera at screens, and without letting the tension slack.

Throughout the film, the notion of remote observation, whether through cameras or by spying on communications, is used to create a sense of physical danger. This is woven together with moments of more obvious immediate peril, facilitated by Sam’s naivety. Exactly who is the bad guy isn’t always clear, and indeed we may be looking at something closer to a collection of predators pursuing one another. Gradually realising that any care she may receive is dependent on her value as an asset, Sam is keen to graduate from prey status, but how far will she go to achieve that?

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