‘Compound’ Uses Security Camera Footage to Show the Violent Downfall of an Off-the-Grid Family, Reflecting America’s Increasing Surveillance State Paranoia

Sometimes films come out at a time that lines up eerily well with real life. As Americans debate the ethics of the nearly ubiquitous Flock cameras that are being placed in neighborhoods all throughout the nation, with only vague information made available about how they will help police, citizens of all political stripes are worried about this increased monitoring.

That real-life backdrop feeds squarely into the world of “Compound,” a thriller where privacy and surveillance push a community to the brink. In the film, a paranoid family living off the grid constantly records their remote property via a series of interconnected cameras. Things get dire and violent as the outside world begins threatening the solitude of the well-armed family. The end result is a feature stitched together from the footage.

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“Building this world of the Williams compound, led by Sarah Williams, this veteran who is paranoid, it would make sense that she would install all these cameras across her property where she’s trying to teach her kids her lifestyle,” director and cowriter James Mulcahy says. “So it was a surveillance camera movie first, tied to this authenticity, tied to family. For me, the best type of horror movie is a movie that’s about something a little bit more. Finding these themes of paranoia and familial bonds really came to life once we started playing around on the property and really developing the characters and what we could do with the cameras.”

“Compound,” which began screening as part of this year’s TIFF marketplace, was shot on location at a Texas cabin using real security cameras rigged around the property. While it was a way to keep the budget down, it called for a deconstruction of how the narrative would be shot. In order to add realism, Mulcahy, who wrote the film with Max Perkins, created a system of filming he called “The Immersive World Approach.”

“It’s a hot set everywhere,” he says. “For one scene, there might be six or seven cameras rolling, capturing it from different vantage points. The actors really have to live in the scene. There might be a few pages of script, but we’re starting before those pages and we’re going after those pages. Even when they think they are done, they still have to stay in character because another camera might be catching them. In post, it became a fun game to construct how it would be told because we had so many options.”

One of the toughest parts of this approach was that the actors themselves were somewhat isolated, making it challenging to relay new ideas or tweaks to them.

“We’re in a basic control room and trying to watch six or seven different angles,” Mulcahy says. “Giving performance notes was kind of a relay game through walkies and things like that. But that’s the nature of the shoot. You’re kind of removed from the action at certain points, and we were too when we were directing and watching.”

While more traditional filmmakers might balk at the approach, the “Compound” team embraced the quirkiness.

“I love creativity within constraint,” Mulcahy says. “We did a number of workshops and choreography of the action and the stunts. We built them around the frame early. ‘How do we make this cool in edit?’ Maybe that’s the normal question, but for us, it was how to make this cool practically, live in this frame that we can’t change. That became a lot of fun, and it became kind of a test. I think it forces you to be more creative sometimes and there’s a better result.”

Despite being so unconventional, Mulcahy is optimistic that audiences in pursuit of dynamic new storytelling will find “Compound.”

“People say they want something that’s very fresh and original, and we tried to do something that felt like nothing else, both in the way it’s consumed and also in the way it’s made,” he says. “Hopefully, people will respond to that.”

As we wrap our conversation, I quip that with the ubiquity of Flock cameras, Mulcahy could film a spiritual sequel in his native New Jersey.

“Seriously … that’s no joke,” he says. “People are really thinking about the cameras around them in a way they haven’t before. It’s a little by accident that this kind of movie is happening at this moment. But it’s this idea of, ‘When does paranoia about a thing manifest the thing?’ It’s at the core of the story, and I think we’re dealing with a lot of that in society right now.”