Kyle Mangione-Smith’s debut feature Compliance (2026) is a one-man tour-de-force of writing, directing, editing and production (assisted by an impressive Kickstarter campaign). It introduces Mangione-Smith as a formidable genre talent to keep an eye on. Categorizing Compliance as a found-footage horror/thriller barely scratches the densely textured surface of a narrative constructed from multiple sources of footage—home surveillance cameras, dashcams, bodycams, hacked webcams, smartphone text messages—to create a narrative exploring modern surveillance, dark web crime, and conspiracy twisted together in a dread-inducing knot of dystopian paranoia.
As synopsized by Mangione-Smith, Sam Cornell (Megan Wilcox), a young crisis manager at the tech startup UVisit, is given the mission to contain the damage of a sexual assault scandal that threatens to undo a multi-million-dollar deal. While trying to control the narrative and support an uncollaborative victim (Lindsey Normington), Sam eventually becomes a targeted pawn in a deadly game architected by a powerful and obscure shadow organization. True to the film’s title, Sam becomes both behaviorally compliant and unwittingly complicit in a corporate, prurient dive into dark perversity whose endgame is far from clear.
Compliance asks questions that strike at the heart of fear and uncertainty, bracketing a seeming normalcy as the stage for looming abnormality and subversion. What fascinated me was how Sam's full compliance is achieved, most notably in the film’s final sequences where mass media images and key political moments are overlaid and distressed, nearly beyond recognition, though threateningly subliminal. It rivals the brainwashing sequences of John Frankenhemer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) or Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and harkens the Spanish conception of evil entering through the eye.
The plot is both psychedelic and supernatural. Steve (Brian McCaig) is an incurably romantic and nubbish ex-con with big dreams of converting a Las Vegas parking lot into a luxury resort, all in hopes of regaining custody of his son. The only problem is he needs investors and lots of money. To earn some quick cash, Steve accepts a gig to drive a mob boss’ girlfriend around for the night. Her name is Delilah (Natalie Grace) and she’s insolent and crass and has no taste whatsoever in wigs. She’s an “andale, andale, andale” kind of bitch. At one of her stops she overdoses on drugs, dies, and her body is taken over by one of the Four Horsemen (Death, of course) who is trying to avoid her duties at the upcoming Armageddon. She takes off her wig, looks in a mirror, fixes her make-up by touching up her apocalypse (pun intended), and adopts a faintly British accent. Steve is blissfully unaware that his passenger has transformed but—in Delilah’s new incarnation—they meet cute and Steve falls in love. Unavoidable Fate has rarely felt so inevitably fantastic or irresistibly fun.
Comparable to Armageddon Road, Animals of the Land could be classified as Biblical horror, though the Bible is never mentioned. It’s opening is Edenic, however, set at the beginning of time where a mother and father and their two sons live in perfect harmony with Mother Nature, but—as mythologist Joseph Campbell detailed in his study The Way of the Animal Powers (1983)—early humanity emphasized a spiritual, animistic connection between humans and nature. They understood life through animal totems, rituals designed to honor the "animal master," and the acceptance of life and death as interdependent cycles. Defiance of the “animal master”—in this case a female tusked boar (in whose name mayhem erupts)—upsets the natural balance, requiring a blood sacrifice to regain equilibrium.
The set-up is solid, but the film capsizes into one of the common and unfortunate pitfalls of low-budget independent filmmaking. Cinematographer Jon Patterson plunges the film’s most cathartic scenes into murky darkness so that it’s very difficult to see and, thus, understand what’s going on. In all fairness, this might have been the result of a poor streaming link and possibly corrected in theatrical exhibition. But it wasn’t just the lack of visibility that pulled me right out of the film. The final quarter seems to be nothing but incessant screaming and shouting and howling as the characters devolve into animalistic and endocannibalistic behavior. I can watch news coverage of the Trump regime for that.
