Craig Zobel

6.5 Great World of Sound (2007)
7.2 Compliance (2012)
6.5 Z for Zachariah (2015)
7.3 The Hunt (2020)

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Craig Zobel debuted with Great World of Sound (2007).

Compliance (2012) is more an emotional shock than just a psychological thriller. Zobel manages to create escalating uninterrupted suspense about the cruel harrowing situation. Knowing from the beginning that it is a real story makes the viewer react even more violently to the nonsense on the screen.

Sandra is the middle-aged manager of a fast-food joint whose day starts badly because someone left the freezer open and wasted a lot of food. She summons all the employees, doesn't accuse anybody but demands that all cooperate because it's a friday, guaranteed to be a busy day. Her employees include a sexy blond teenager, Becky, her friend Kevin and the older Marti and handyman Harold, who leaves after fixing something. Before they open the joint, they chat about their love lives and Sandra reveals that her boyfriend Van seems ready to propose. Van calls to tell her that he's going our to drink with his buddy. They open the restaurant and, sure enough, it's a busy day. Suddenly a man calls identifying himself as a cop named Daniels and claiming that a young employee stole money from a customer. The cop claims to have Sandra's boss on the other line and a witness. Sandra assumes that he's talking about Becky, although the cop didn't say the name. Becky is shocked and protests her innocence. Sandra cooperates with the cop trying to be as diligent as asked. The cop asks Sandra to conduct a strip-search of Becky and leave her clothes and belongings in her car outside, otherwise he will have to take Becky to the police station and she'll spend the night in jail. Becky hesitate but Sandra convinces her that it's the best option to solve the problem right away. Sandra argues that she cannot strip search Becky without another person present and brings in Marti. The cop then talks to Becky and intimidates her. Becky strips as instructed and Sandra walks to the car and leaves her belongings in the car as instructed. All the while Sandra believes that Becky has indeed stolen, despite Becky's protestations. The cop's instructions become more and more weird, but he keeps claiming that he's trying to avoid that the girl ends up in jail. Sandra asks the cop when he's coming to pick up Becky's belongings and the cop replies that he is searching Becky's home for drugs because her brother is suspected of being a drug dealer. Becky is detained in the back of the restaurant wearing only an apron. At this point things have become so weird that we suspect this is a scam and the film shows us that the "cop" is not a cop but just a man calling from his living room. The cop demands that a male guards Becky and forces Sandra to order Kevin to guard the naked Becky but Kevin refuses. The cop asks for another male and Sandra offers her boyfriend. She calls Van who shows up half drunk. Sandra then returns to the restaurant because it's a really busy day, so she never quite realizes what goes on between the cop and Van. The cop instructs Van to get Becky completed naked and to spank her because she is not cooperating: she is still covering her intimate parts with her hands. The cop orders increasingly humiliating acts from Becky and threatens Van if he doesn't make Becky obey. Outside Kevin and the other employees are concerned but nobody does anything. Every now Sandra checks what is going on but she never doubts the cop, scolds Becky for not cooperating and hardly notices that Val is embarrassed. Meanwhile we see that the "cop" is using a calling card and the calling card is running out of money. The cop quickly recharges the card and returns to the call, instructing Becky to perform fellatio on Van. They are just done when Sandra walks in to check on them. Van, now feeling guilty and ashamed, simply walks out without saying a word. Becky doesn't speak either, terrified. Luckily, handyman Harold walks in and he has common sense: he realizes right away that the "cop" is no cop and the whole story doesn't make sense. Finally, Sandra has doubts and decides to call her boss, who is supposed to be on the other line with the cop: the boss knows nothing about it. Sandra now realizes she's been duped all the time. It's a horrible scam. She hangs up speechless. The real police arrive to investigate what happened. Becky is finally free but she has been the victim of a rape, facilitated by Sandra. The security cameras filmed everything. The detective finds out that the same scam has happened elsewhere. They track down the calling card and who bought it: a family man who works for a corporation. A lawyer helps Becky file a lawsuit. Sandra is interviewed by a TV station and claims that she simply obeyed order. The interviewer points out it makes no sense that she never got suspicious at any point of the ordeal. Sandra points out that Becky went along with it, without rebelling. Van has been arrested for rape.

(In reality, a prison guard was arrested for impersonating the cop but then acquitted by the jury for lack of evidence, the restaurant manager lost her job but didn't do time in jail, the only one to go to jail was her boyfriend, and the girl was awarded a huge sum in a civil trial against the restaurant chain, which was McDonald's).

Z for Zachariah (2015), written by Nissar Modi, is a kammerspiel set in an isolated deserted landscape among three people who need to find new meanings to their lives after an apocalypse. Note: A love triangle among a Black engineer, a White woman and a White man who may be the last people on Earth is also the theme of Ranald MacDougall's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959).

The film opens with images of urban devastation. There is only one person wandering around, wearing protective clothes and a mask. She loads some things into a wheelbarrow and then pushes the wheelbarrow out of town an up a hill to the compound where she lives alone, surrounded by a vast wilderness. Ann farms, hunts, prays in the chapel next door and her only company is her dog. Then one morning she runs into another survivor, a Black man, John, also wearing a protective suit and a mask. She watches him as he realizes that over there he can breath the air. When her dog scares him, John pulls out a gun, terrified that she might be radioactive. It turns out that he is the one who is radioactive because he bathed in a radioactive pond at the bottom of a beautiful waterfall. He gets sick and she nurses him until he recovers. We learn that she survived because the valley is sheltered from the winds and he survived because he was working in a government bunker. Ann is a very religious woman, who thanks God before every meal, whereas John is an engineer who doesn't believe. Ann tells John that her parents and her teenage brother left to find other survivors, and never returned. John starts helping Ann with the many chores of the farm, and Ann is very friendly towards him. John offers to create a power station at the waterfall but he needs wood to build a water-wheel. John thinks that they could use the planks and beams of the chapel, but Ann is clearly uncomfortable with the idea of demolishing the house of God. One evening Ann seduces John but John doesn't want to have sex without really explaining why. One day another survivor appears, Caleb, a White man. Ann is happier than John to have a new companion. Caleb is also religious like Ann. Caleb however convinces Ann to let John build his waterwheel and they all work together to demolish the chapel. John tells them that he met a radiation-poisoned teenager in pain who begged to kill him. Later, John confesses to Ann that he thinks the teenager was her brother. Ann and Caleb finally have sex, just after John confessed to Ann that he is in love with her. Ann apologizes to John, and John pretends it's nothing to him, but later John admits to Caleb that he cares for Ann. John and Caleb complete the waterwheel but Caleb slips and dies (It is not clear whether John could have saved him). John tells Ann that Caleb left. She runs along the road trying to find Caleb. She stops talking Caleb attaches the cables that bring electricity to the house and Ann realizes that lights and the refregerator work. Ann plays her church organ. John approaches her. They don't speak but he sits down and starts praying.

The Hunt (2020), written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, stands with Adam McKay's Don't Look Up (2021) as one of the best satires of the world of conspiracy theories created by social media. It's a revenge horror movie of sorts, where the aristocrats who are the victims and the avengers of the social influencers become the very perpetrators imagined by the influencers, and the influencers who destroyed their career become their victims. The film then becomes a parody of itself, of its own "revenge" genre, because the ultimate protagonist is a heroine who was picked by mistake (a namesake) who goes on to become a killing machine a` la Tarantino's Kill Bill and the concluding duel is pure farce. The ending is weak: a corporation executive who has trained to become a match for a special-force agent and, instead of simply shoting dead the last victim, engages in a lengthy duel, and still doesn't realize that she got the wrong person, and incidentally she seems indifferent to the death of her entire team. The heroine is no less cynical: she doesn't hesitate to kill an innocent and, upon winning the duel, she simply boards a plane to get home, without bothering to call the police and the media. The ultimate message seems to be that the line between good and evil is blurred, and there is nothing we can do against evil except save ourselves and let the world continue to be a madhouse.

The film opens in a corporation where executives exchange text messages about a hunt for humans called "deplorables" in the manor of the CEO, Athena.
We then move to Athen's private plane that is transporting a group of the executives. As they are enjoying the flight, a man staggers into the cabin from the back of the plane and they all get terrified. One of the executives mentions that the man woke up too early and quickly attacks him in front of the others. The man doesn't die and Athena brutally kills him with a high-heel shoe.
We then move to a place in a forest where a number of people wake up with gags locked in their mouths. They are all clueless about what happened: they have been kidnapped out of the blue and woke up there. One of them, Crystal, ignores the others. In the middle of a meadow there is a big box. They open it and find weapons inside. A pig comes out of it. They arm themselves. A girl then finds an envelop with keys to open their gags. Now they are technically free and armed. But someone starts shooting at them, killing some and wounding others. Trying to escape, a woman falls into a trap and is impaled in a spike. A man helps her out but they are both blown up by a landmine. Four of them reach a barbed wire fence. They start climbing it but someone starts shooting arrows and kills one. The other three run along a road until they reach a gas station. They walk into the store and find a terrified old couple who immediately offers them all their money. The trio asks where they are and the puzzled couple tells them they are in Arkansas. The trio behaves like panicking convicts who just escaped. The trio mentions a "Manorgate" conspiracy theory according to which a group of wealthy liberals are capturing ordinary people and hunting them at an exclusive manor. They are quickly tried by the old couple, that turns out to be part of the "hunt". The old couple just finished cleaning up the mess when someone on a walkie talkie alerts them that another victim is approaching their location: Crystal. From their conversation we guess that the old couple are Left-leaning liberals. They play a video on the TV set so we guess that they are just pretending to be in Arkansas. Crystal walks in and doesn't do what we expect: instead of shouting that someone is trying to kill her, she calmly asks for cigarettes and then figures out that the couple is lying to her. Before they can grab a gun Crystal kills them both, revealing to be a formidable warrior. Crystal walks outside towards the couple's pickup truck but realizes that it is booby-trapped. She also finds that the real plate is from Croatia, not Arkansas. She hides and hears the "hunters" communicating on the walkie talkies. She hears that another victim is approaching, Gary. She saves Gary when he tries to open the door of the truck. They walk away together. Gary believes in the Manorgate conspiracy too. We learn that Crystal has military training. Crystal helps him jump on a cargo train. They find a group of Arab refugees hiding in the car. The train stops at a police checkpoint and they are all arrested. Gary is a right-wing redness who tries to talk to the Croatian soldiers but they ignore him. One of the Arab refugees starts speaking fluent English to him, revealing that he was just acting. In fact, he works for the "hunters". Gary kills him. Crystal and Gary demand to contact the US embassy. Crystal tells the guards of being kidnapped and the officer in charge introduces him to a man with a similar story, the middle-aged Don. Gary disappears. Soon a car of the embassy arrives to escort them out. As they are driving away, Crystal suddenly attacks and kills the driver, much to Gary's dismay. She obviously suspects that he is part of the conspiracy. They find Gary's body in the trunk of the car, confirming her suspicion. Don would like to just flee, but Crystal decides to attack. Using the driver's map found in the car, they drive to the compound, which happens to be an underground bunker located under the box in the meadow. Crystal enters the bunker and kills everybody inside: they are all executives of the corporation, and the Manorgate conspiracy theory seems to be confirmed. All the victims of the hunt believed in it, except Crystal. Don doesn't fight but grabs a gun. Crystal seems to be his loyalty: he could be working for the hunters too. Athena calls on the walkie talkie asking for Don and asking Don whether Crystal is dead. This convinces Crystal that Don is an enemy and she kills him, although Don keeps repeating that he is not and doesn't try to kill her when he can. Now it's Crystal against Athena. Crystal interrogates one of the men who is still breathing. We learn that Crystal fought in Afghanistan for the US special forces and so has the training of a professional warrior. She learns Athena's whereabouts: the nearby manor. It all seems to match the conspiracy theory, except that they are in Croatia, not in the USA. Crystal is admitted by Athena into the manor after she drops her gun. Athena now reveals that the Manorgate conspiracy originated one year earlier when she exchanged some jokes about it: someone leaked the text messages and social media influencers turned it into a conspiracy theory that went viral and ruined the careers of all the executives involved in the joke. Athena and the other executives decided to take their revenge on these influencers: they staged Manorgate for real but picking as victims the influencers who destroyed their careers. Crystal is puzzled why she was included. Athena thinks that she is one of the "deplorable" influencers, but Crystal is not: Athena confused her with a namesake of her hometown. Athena doesn't believe her. Crystal attacks her, but we learned that Athena trained for one year. They begin a lengthy martial-art duel. Crystal eventually kills Athena who, before dying, asks Crystal to tell the truth, and Crystal confirms that she is not the influencer Crystal. Athena dies saying "oops". Crystal sees Athena's private airplane waiting in the runway. Crystal wears Athena's clothes and boards the plane, surprising pilot and flight attendant, and demands to be taken home.