Yes, I realised part-way through that this was a story based on a series of incidents which ended up in young girls in America being sexually assaulted at work (in fast-food outlets) by staff and others around them, directed by a person on the phone claiming to be the police. He was getting them to deal with a member of staff who he told them had been caught stealing from a customer.
Not knowing that this was a true story, or at least based on truth, I started watching it unfold thinking that it was a cheap, fantasy, imaginative thriller for those wanting to see a bizarre situation turn into an audience-titillating one with nudity. The further it went along, the more I was saying "yeah, right" to myself as the people involved made more and more ludicrous decisions about what they did and fell into compliance with the man on the phone, expecting it to almost end up as a comedy. But no - nothing of the sort.
Sandra, the shift manager, played amazingly well by Ann Dowd (who did an equally worthy - and chilling - job as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale - spookily enough in another compliance-type role) as she gets more and more concerned with the things she is asked to do to/with the girl by the 'policeman' on the other end of the phone. But she complies. It's a confidence trick and nasty hoax played out in near real-time during a busy Friday evening shift where the team is already understaffed.
We begin to get to know the girl at the centre of attention when she starts her shift. She's a typical teenager doing a job she has no interest in for the money, pushing boundaries and getting away with whatever corners can be cut. Becky is the character's name and she's played with an equally amazing performance by Dreama Walker (Gran Torino, The Good Wife) turning from cocky teenager into cornered, frightened rat in a short space of time.
I won't go into the details of what transpires and what the girl has done to her, but as we continue to view (and after I checked to see that this was not a fantasy writer's fiction), we start to ask ourselves why these people are behaving as they do and not twigging earlier on that something is horribly wrong. But apparently that's what happened. And continued to happen in a similar way in a long string of incidents in these types of situations.
We can see on Sandra's face that she's not happy, not comfortable, is fighting with herself and her moral compass but ultimately continues to be taken in by the confidence of the man pretending to be a police officer on the phone, demonstrating how gullible people can be when faced with confidence tricksters. As the end credits roll, we're told that there had been a string of 70 of these incidents happen in 31 states across America going back to the 1990's. A man was arrested for the crimes but never convicted because of a lack of evidence.
There have been other social experiments conducted across time, sometimes made into films and documentaries where ordinary people have been placed into roles of power or subservience with resulting titular compliance, not least of all, the German people in WWII. Difficult watch as this film is, you can go into it knowing that it's based on truth. It's real edge-of-seat stuff as we live the shift with the people involved, very well held together by Ann Dowd. Highly recommended viewing if for no other reason, to raise awareness of what people out there are capable of - and hopefully so that others don't get caught out. Available via various streaming services in the UK as I write.
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