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(Fantastic Fest 2026) COMPLIANCE Is Watching You...and So Is Corporate

By. Katelyn Nelson

I have said in the past, and often, that I consider found footage to be an especially evergreen format for horror, especially when done well. For better or worse, that is proving true in more ways than one with each passing day. As we navigate living through—and fighting against—a climate of uncomfortable and often weaponized surveillance, found footage feels more than ever like the best way to capture the overbearing sense of dread of the every day. The 2026 Fantastic Fest has its fair share of found footage offerings, but perhaps none captures this feeling of being watched and used against our will for things we aren’t even aware of. The internet is forever, after all, but so, too, might consequences be—at least in Kyle Mangione-Smith’s world.

Written and directed by Kyle Mangione-Smith and made for only $100,000 in just two weeks’ time, COMPLIANCE is a dive into the unrelenting nightmare scenario of crisis PR management. Fresh off its Fantastic Fest North American premiere, Mangione-Smith’s debut proves both that analog horror is more present than ever and that the digital landscape we’ve created for ourselves is as much a trap as a playground.

COMPLIANCE turns cameras and screens into instruments of surveillance, but recorded images can create as easily as they can expose. At Fantasia, Radek Velicka explored a very different relationship between people and the camera in YOU ARE THE FILM, a strange little sci-fi romance about filmmaking, imagination, and the stories we create through a lens.

COMPLIANCE follows Sam Cornell (Megan Wilcox, who stuns in her feature debut), a social worker-turned PR representative for an Airbnb-esque tech company who must deal with the fallout of an assault case on the eve of a major deal. She soon finds herself in over her head in more ways than one, battling her inner moral compass, a boss who couldn’t care less about anything other than money and appearances, and a shadowy organization that is after the company and investors alike.

Shot on everything from iPhones to security cameras, the film unfolds as an unrelenting surveillance nightmare that, if anything, will center just how visually monitored the modern world has become. Megan Wilcox’s performance as Sam is perhaps the strongest element propelling COMPLIANCE forward. She plays a pitch-perfect example of someone stuck in a position she doesn’t really want to be in, but out of financial necessity finds herself twisting the narrative of her actual role into something more internally palatable until the truth of it is so loud as to be unignorable. She’s virtually bubbling over with unease every second she’s onscreen—even before she’s fighting for a different kind of survival altogether.

 

Lindsey Normington’s turn as Sarah, the victim of the assault Sam is trying desperately to help, is equally unsettling, playing the other side of fear-turned-righteous-anger. The combination of these two mindsets bucking against the corporate machine that wishes to smooth them into silence would be a tense watch in any other format, but the unbroken emphasis on telling the story through surveillance, video calls, text exchanges, streams, and extra-glitched out newscasts sinks the stakes deeper into your skin.

COMPLIANCE proves that Kyle Mangione-Smith has come on the scene to make a name for himself and his work in the most confrontational way possible, and we as horror fans are all the better served for it.

COMPLIANCE isn't the first film this year to have Katelyn questioning what the internet has done to us. In her Chattanooga Film Festival roundup, she found another particularly nasty corner of online life in LENORE, a cold examination of social media, entitlement, and terminally online fandom.