“Compliance” turns corporate cleanup into found-footage paranoia

A crisis manager gets assigned to contain a sexual assault scandal at a tech startup. Then somebody much larger starts pulling the strings.

That is the setup for “Compliance,” a new found-footage horror film from first-time feature director Kyle Mangione-Smith. A teaser arrived this week ahead of the movie’s North American premiere at Fantastic Fest later this month.

Megan Wilcox stars as Sam Cornell, a crisis manager working for tech company UVisit. A scandal is threatening a multimillion-dollar business deal, and Sam is sent in to control the damage while trying to support the victim.

Instead, she gets pulled into a violent conspiracy involving a powerful organization with resources far beyond anything she expected.

Lindsey Normington and Charlie Wood also star.

The film has already screened at London’s FrightFest and digs into surveillance, dark-web crime, corporate power and political conspiracy.

That combination is unusually grounded for found footage. No abandoned asylum. No twenty-year-old VHS tape somebody found behind a wall. The horror starts with a company trying to protect a deal.

Screenlife and found-footage horror have evolved a lot since “The Blair Witch Project.” “Host” trapped people inside a Zoom call. “Unfriended” turned a laptop screen into the entire crime scene. “Compliance” is taking corporate communication, digital surveillance and online conspiracy culture and feeding them through the same machinery.

Frankly, anybody who has ever watched a company attempt crisis management online knows half the nightmare is already written.