{Fantastic Fest 2026} Screenlife, Qanon, and Compliance

The title here is doing quiet, deliberate work. Compliance is built entirely around screens, laptop cameras, CCTV feeds, phones that never stop buzzing, and the longer you sit with it, the clearer the thesis becomes: if we know we’re being watched constantly, we’ll go along with almost anything. Jeremy Bentham would be proud his idea of the Panopticon is still going strong. Hell I bet Peter Thiel watches this movie and thinks its a great idea. The idea being that the surveillance class doesn’t need a guard actually watching, just the possibility of one, and people will police themselves into obedience anyway. Whats next Zuckerberg discovers John Hobbes (and you can bet on that at Kalshi, love your dystopia yet)? Kyle Mangione-Smith’s film takes that idea and drags it into a Slack channel, a laptop webcam, a tech start up’s crisis management playbook, and lets it curdle into something genuinely unsettling.

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The setup here is corporate horror of a very contemporary flavor. Sam Cornell (Megan Wilcox) is a young crisis manager at UVisit, a tech start up trying to survive the fallout from a sexual assault scandal that threatens to torch a multi-million dollar deal IPO deal. Sam’s job is to contain the story while nominally supporting the uncooperative survivor at the center of it, and it’s queasy, compromised work right from the jump. Before long, Sam finds herself pulled into something much larger, a shadowy, well resourced organization pulling strings well above her pay grade, and she has no real choice left but to help the equally shadowy resistance.

Mangione-Smith tells almost all of this through Screenlife, the desktop and phone interface style that’s become something of an endangered format lately, and it’s genuinely great to see someone still exploring it with this much craft. The film uses Screenlife not just as a gimmick but as an intimacy device, dropping the audience directly into the middle of Slack channel arguments so we all get to share in that particular flavor of corporate hellscape together. There’s a UVisit fake commercial embedded in here that’s fantastic, sharp corporate satire in miniature. And there’s a wonderful bit of visual storytelling when Sam realizes her own laptop camera and others hidden throughout her apartment has been watching her the whole time, a seamless swing into and out of the Screenlife format that builds tension and mystery better than almost any conventional cut could.

Some of the film’s shot choices lean into a scattered, almost flock like mundane tracking of the action. And there’s a lot of paranoia here. Watching Sam get pulled deeper into UVisit’s machine, I kept thinking I could never survive working somewhere like this. The pressure, the casual monstrosity of it all, might be more than a bridge too far for a lot of viewers, and that’s clearly the point.

Wilcox is carrying nearly the entire film on her own, and she’s excellent doing it. Watch her unravel across the runtime, a meltdown most of us would probably have in her position, and she never loses the thread of who Sam is underneath the crisis management veneer. I’m also a sucker for a good hyperlink investigation sequence, all those browser tabs and half buried search results doing the legwork of a mystery, and this movie knows exactly how to scratch that itch. It’s the kind of film people are going to pause and rewatch specifically to dig up the easter eggs buried in the margins.

That said, Sam makes some genuinely bonehead choices along the way, ignoring a billion emails and seventeen unread texts while the walls close in, which is realistic in its own maddening way even when it’s frustrating to watch. The film’s scares land hard too. The 911 call to start is harrowing, and there’s a real trigger warning list here, sexual assault included, that’s fairly graphic and worth knowing about going in.

Where Compliance stumbles a bit is in its back half. The film clearly wants to show rather than tell, but then drops in a weirdly overlong Anonymous style exposition dump that undercuts its own restraint, and the Anonymous voice itself is nearly impossible to parse under a wall of electronica. The political material the film introduces around protests and defined conspiratorial sides muddies what could have been a cleaner, richer story about a powerful cabal closing ranks. QAnon even makes an appearance, and I’m still not entirely sure what angle the film thought it was pursuing there. The final act is frantic and genuinely nerve wracking, edge of your seat stuff, but it’s also a little bit of a mess and borderline incoherent by the closing stretch. And yet, even with that mess, the conspiracy angle alone is strong enough to carry it across the finish line. The static noise mixed through the climax is also cranked way too loud for way too long. The movie doesn’t need it and ultimately it takes away from an absolutely taught and exciting techno thriller.

None of that stops Compliance from working. The split screen work throughout is genuinely excellent, the film has a slightly eerie undercurrent running through it from start to finish, and it sticks the landing with a genuinely fun credits sequence. This would make an outstanding double feature with Primetime, for anyone looking to pair it up. Now is your chance as Primetime has been added to Fantastic Fest recently.

I watched Compliance as part of its North American Premiere at Fantastic Fest, screening Sunday, September 20 at 8:30 PM. Tickets and the full festival schedule are available at fantasticfest.com/film-guide.