It's a busy Friday night in a branch of the US fast-food chain ChickWich. A harassed, middle-aged manager takes a call from a police officer, who informs her that there is a thief on the premises: a female employee has stolen money from a customer's purse, and it is up to her to detain the teenage miscreant until the police arrive. As a law-abiding member of the public, the manager is eager to help. Eager to a fault, in fact. "I'll do everything you need," she says, as she prepares to carry out his first task: a strip-search of the employee. There's just one problem. The voice belongs not to a policeman but to a hoax-caller determined to test the limits of human subservience to authority.

Although this is the premise for the cringingly suspenseful new film Compliance, it also actually happened. And not just once: over the course of 10 years starting in the mid-1990s, 70 such cases of prank callers tricking staff into performing humiliating acts on their workmates were reported across 30 US states. A suspect – David Stewart, a married father of five – was arrested and tried in relation to one of these prank calls, but was acquitted. McDonald's, Taco Bell and Wendy's were among those targeted but, as this is a fictional film rather than a documentary, the name of the chain – ChickWich – has been fabricated.

"When I first heard about the case, it threw up questions I didn't have the answers to," explains Craig Zobel, the 36-year-old American writer and director of the film. "I was thinking: 'Who is wrong in the situation and exactly how wrong are they?' What amount of blame can you place on the manager, for instance? Some, certainly, but how much? She was very skilfully manipulated."

Many audiences, he concedes, have been incredulous about the behaviour of characters in Compliance. It isn't only the manager who takes leave of her senses in the presence of this perceived authority figure. On her say-so, junior staff members and even her own fiance collude in the incremental abuse of this young woman, some by active participation and others through simply doing nothing. Meanwhile, the victim clutches an apron to her naked body while the voice on the phone demands ever-more degrading punishments.

Zobel's previous works include the award-winning 2007 comedy The Great World of Sound, about record industry talent scouts. Real people performed in its audition scenes without knowing it was actually a film shoot. Compliance reflects Zobel's belief that most of us have a tendency, however faint, to acquiesce to authority. "I've had experience of that, and not only with cops. Sometimes, I'll do what a security guard tells me. Then you think, 'Wait – I didn't have to obey you!' And yet we do. We trust that they are there to protect us and that they won't abuse that. It's a social contract. I hesitate to say the film is about one thing, but to my mind it deals with how people use authority, how people respond to it, and how it's baked into all the decisions we make."

Compliance has already been acclaimed by other directors including William Friedkin (who called it "brave, important and chilling"), Paul Schrader, Todd Solondz and John Waters (who chose it as one of his 2012 favourites). And it has all the makings of a provocative, must-see talking-point, along the lines of last year's The Imposter, a documentary about French conman Frédéric Bourdin. As unpleasant as it is to sit through, Compliance is expansive and illuminating; its metaphorical reach is so vast it takes only the smallest of mental leaps to get from the ChickWich store room to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and even Nazi Germany. "I hope it generates discussion," says Zobel. "That's what it was made for. I didn't want to impose my perspective on the film. It was more like, 'This happened and it seems outlandish and crazy to me – what about you?'"

It also feels appropriate that the entire ghastly horror story should happen in a fast-food joint, the sort of place few enter without entering a zone of denial about what exactly they're consuming. "It's like Oz, isn't it?" says Zobel. "'Don't look behind the curtain. I don't want to know how many calories are in this!' I think the same story could have happened in, say, a financial institution, but the fast-food environment is one where authority is so structured that it seems to lend itself to this abuse. And when you think about it, what's the first thing they say to you when you walk up to the counter?" He pauses. "'Can I take your order?'"

Compliance is released on Friday.