FF '26: Compliance
The world is in a very strange place, more specifically the United States is in a very, very strange place. Celebrity presidents, creators of bleeding edge technology saying it will turn on us sooner than later, a 24-hour newscycle that gets worse and worse every hour. It seems like we're living in a Metal Gear Solid plot. Living in a constant state of surveillance, it was only a matter of time until someone made a found footage movie about it. The concept of Compliance is promising on paper: A young woman’s home is found to be bugged with cameras that she never put there, and she must go on a journey to discover why any of this is going on. The execution of Compliance is a completely different story.
Compliance touts itself as a found footage movie that uses all the devices that we’re used to seeing: phones, laptop cameras, DSLRs, security cameras, your iPad, your kid’s iPad, you name it. For the most part, it does, but it never feels like it’s a natural progression of these devices. Instead for about half the movie it feels like the devices are at play depending on what serves the story most for that particular moment. This problem remedies itself as the plot progresses and puts the characters in more reasonable situations for the cameras to play a bit more, but for a good chunk of the film it feels like the camera isn’t another character like in most found footage movies. This feels like a disservice to the narrative use of a found footage. Instead of these events happening in a more natural way, it feels like the found footage aspect is being used as a gimmick. The movie never takes time to cope with the ethics of an always-online society, but rather uses it as a crutch to show us more things happening. A big part of this is the concept of people that are chronically online and being radicalized by the media and online alternative communities. Instead of showing the nuance of how these people become radicals, it instead just stamps them with a “bad guy” tag that it doesn’t fully commit to.
The politics here are kind of confusing. It feels like the movie wants to analyze the alt-right groups that you find online, but also wants to criticize them through a lens that seems to favor them. It all leads to a big mess, with a line that seems as if it's throwing stones in the wrong direction, that will more than likely leave a bad taste in your mouth. The culmination of the movie leads to what feels like a 30-minute montage of political clips with a loud, harsh, noise-adjacent sound playing over it while the screen flashes. A true visual onslaught that did nothing to help the movie and only served to anger and infuriate the audience.
The two actresses here seem to really be trying their hardest with the material given, but it's so thin and barebones that they’re grasping at straws trying to give either one of these characters anything. One works for a fake AirBnb trying to cover up that a young woman was the victim of sexual assault while staying in their rental, and the other is the victim of the incident who might have more insidious motives. A weird way to approach this – to make the victim have ulterior motives in a movie that already seems so confused. The movie doesn’t really have anything for them to do, one scene opting to eat up some runtime by having a woman dance to the entirety of Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” just to have her trip and discover a camera is placed in her home. Look, “A Milli" is a great song, but this was just a bad way to move the action forward in a movie that already has a pretty short runtime.
Maybe having grown up with the Internet and knowing about the fabled red rooms is why this movie seemed so blah. The idea of a movie about the red rooms is an exciting prospect, similar to how a Creepypasta movie is an exciting prospect, but it all falls to how it's executed. Here, it’s all sloppily thrown together and works up to a confusing and underbaked conclusion. Not everything needs to be pristine in found footage, but it should at the very least be engaging and engaged with its premise.
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Blake Williams has a B.A. in Film and Television Production from Ball State University. He aspires to one day be a director, but until that day comes you can find him at a showing of whatever's playing that day or at home alphabetizing a shelf of movies and games and muttering about how he should "slow down on spending."