This chilling film, written and directed by Craig Zobel, is set in a fast food joint and based closely on the true story of a serial phone-prankster sociopath in the US who, for a decade, got away with a bizarre repeated hoax. His daring escalated and in 2004, he brought off his masterstroke of pure, insidious evil. The con trick was an almost satanic demonstration of the weakness and suggestibility of human nature, more devastating than anything in the well-known Stanford and Milgram experiments, because real lives were wrecked.
The event could have been turned into a documentary – and arguably, a documentary could have provided more of an overview of the trickster's criminal career in total – but Zobel's feature film brings out the creepy, banal horror of this culminating event, and the awful contemporary insights. It's a…show more content… Here is where the real degradation can flourish. Calling an office wouldn't work. The hoaxer needs a backstage area, a scuzzy secret place away from the (supposedly) ultra-clean zone where the public are fed. But calling a private restaurant wouldn't work either. The point is that a chain is always conscious of a menacing corporate authority somewhere above them: branch managers, regional managers, people who might only reveal themselves on the phone. Obedience and badly suppressed fear are the order of the day, especially on the unthinkable subject of hurting a customer. The staff take orders; the customers have limited food options. Relinquishing your free will and simply going with the flow is part of the process for all concerned. A fast food joint is a place to lower your guard as well as your standards. So when some brazen authority figure on the phone knocks everyone for a loop with some new situation, just submitting is all too easy. And yet at any time, in any period, when people supposedly in authority tell us what to do – we do
