Compliance (Fantastic Fest 2026)

Getting its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026 is Kyle Mangione-Smith’s directorial feature debut, Compliance. And while the name may have had many outings over the years, the actual content of the movie is far less well-worn. On the eve of a landmark deal for a major tech start-up, UVISIT is faced with a sexual assault incident on one of their premises, and the resulting controversy threatens to explode and engulf the company in a PR disaster. New hire Sam (Megan Wilcox) is responsible for containing the fallout, and she is utterly unsuccessful at putting the fire out; if anything, she makes the situation with the assaulted Sarah (Lindsey Normington) worse. It’s fair to say that the company and Sam are not compatible, and the entire situation escalates to her being fired. Yet, as the fallout settles, it becomes clear that not all is as it seems, as she quickly finds herself in league with a criminal organisation taking aim at her former employers and their investors.

Found footage is going through something of a transition, moving away from the question that beleaguered so many of its movies: “just who is holding this camera, and why are they still carrying it?” The storytelling mode had to evolve, and Mangione-Smith’s debut is one such example of the next step for this punk rock style of filmmaking. From the off, it’s not strictly found footage, more video recorded from different sources, from internal house CCTV to personal cameras to screen recordings. It even touches upon TV broadcasters, social media live streamers, and bottom-feeder podcasters. This is both traditional found footage style, screen life, and a variety of phones, cameras, and gaps in-between. It still has the issue of who is recording at certain times, but framing events with a title card in all its noisy glory shows that the ruse of faux-reality isn’t a load-bearing wall here. Likewise, the subject character changes around within this; this flexibility allows for some expressive, experimental, and inventive sequences once the narrative begins opening up.

Compliance is interestingly political. After being raped on the grounds of a “UVISIT” premises, Sam is the company person sent in to tidy things up, and as the enemy, she comes armed with an offer of $1 million on the condition she signs an NDA, a classic example of corporations putting business interests first over people. After that jumping-off point, Sam is fired and the conspiracy opens up to reveal that everything we thought to be true isn’t. Sarah, the woman raped, isn’t what she appears to be; rather, she is a conduit to the world we are introduced to. You could describe it as a grotty, dirty vision of LA that David Lynch was fascinated by, albeit here it’s more contemporary and aligned with the world of revenge porn and the dark web. Within that space, Mangione-Smith’s script centres itself on conspiracies like why so many kids are going missing in UVISIT premises, whether the owner, Harry (slimily played by Charlie Wood), may be a paedophile, and the connections between tech companies and political power. Compliance’s questions are adjacent to a lot of the concerns floating around the left, but uses weaponry of the ultra right to tackle them.

The flexibility and experimentalism inherent in taking a form like found footage to communicate the idea of surveillance within a political thriller is clever and explains the prevalence of its many different visual mediums, as opposed to the classic “found” footage model. However, like the originator, it still presents an inescapable issue for Compliance: pacing. This is a very slow film, and while that allows a slow seeping of palpable tension, there’s a trade to be made where each scene is wrestling with overrunning or dragging by a good few minutes. Compliance, like so many formally similar films, runs afoul of this quite often; it’s the double-edged sword that both powers the punk rock DIY ethos and the edge that makes this style so difficult to crack.

It’s fascinating that a film is fundamentally a found footage horror and a political thriller about the outsize influence tech companies have in modern politics. I appreciate the ambition and vision of director Kyle Mangione-Smith, that he can simultaneously share the visual language of horror and the political thriller. Compliance is challenging yet slow, visionary but boring, wholly unique and thrilling yet comfortably twenty minutes too long. Kyle Mangione-Smith has really outed himself as an interesting director with this debut, even if it’s more comfortable with the grime, oppressive nature, and unknowns of the first half than it is with the political commentary of the second. Framing terror through multiple lenses works a treat, as do the company’s attempts to deal with this fast-developing crisis, yet the more politically directed scenes tend to sit a little more awkwardly, becoming a little harder to visually follow.

Acting is always a curious issue for found footage, flirting with the idea of authenticity comes with varying degrees of success because we are fundamentally talking about an entirely different style of performance that has no parallels in either theatre or screen. Few films manage this seamlessly, Compliance included. More problematic is a closing sequence that is sure to come accompanied by a content warning wherever and on whatever medium this debut is screened. This sequence is of profound digital distortion that grows to the point of becoming nausea-inducing. This concluding five-minute stretch closes the circle on the idea of surveillance and compliance; it’s also phenomenally well edited by the writer/director (and producer), but it’s simply too much. We are talking digital distortion, burned-out tapes, and noise hell, all to ask the viewer whether we are willing to go through the same thing as Sam, and how much we are willing to sacrifice to change the world “for the better.” Personally, it’s a no from me.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – COMPLIANCE