'Compliance' trailer a scary study in human behavior

Posted Thursday, July 5, 2012 at 4:58 PM Central
Last updated Thursday, July 5, 2012 at 7:22 PM Central

by John Couture

A couple of days ago while I was in Detroit, the wife and I checked out Safety Not Guaranteed. It was wonderful, but I'll save my gushing for another day.

No, the neat thing is that since it wasn't playing in traditional theaters we had to seek out an arthouse theater to catch it. One of the many cool things about arthouse showings is that they don't show you 25 trailers before the movie. No, they only show you one or two and usually it's similar arthouse fare that will be playing in the arthouse theater in coming weeks or months.

It makes perfect sense given that you are literally reaching your target audience. But again, that's a story for another day. The real story today is the trailer that we saw for a Sundance film called Compliance.

The trailer was so gripping because well, the score was pretty intense and matched the tone of the images shown and because in the back of my head I had a tingling sensation that I've heard this before. Then I saw the "inspired by true events" card and it all clicked.

I remember reading about this incident when it happened a few years ago and thought to myself, much as you will think to yourself when you watch the trailer, how could someone be coerced to do something so horrible to someone else simply by suggestion of a voice over a telephone? Well, it's not as far-fetched as one might think. There's actually been numerous psychological experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment that has shown that authority and brutality go hand in hand.

And this hasn't happened just once. No, a quick check of Wikipedia shows that this scam had reached epidemic levels before tapering off. As someone who has worked in a managerial position in retail before, I would like to say that I wouldn't be as easily led astray, but I guess we would only know for sure if we are ever in that situation.

Anyhow, the trailer below should shock you and from all accounts from Sundance, the performances from Ann Dowd and newcomer Dreama Walker are the real selling points of the movie. It opens in limited theaters on August 17.