Film Review: The Experiment (Das Experiment, 2001)

In case you haven't paid attention to recent events related to pandemics and wars, it doesn't take a lot to turn a person against their fellow humans and do unspeakably evil and violent acts both verbally or physically. This can happen even with those who due to their education, class and background consider themselves too educated, too enlightened, too progressive or too civilised to sink to such levels of barbarity. The 20th Century, and especially WWII, gave ample amount of examples of such phenomena, which in subsequent years led to attempts to study it and understand it. The best known of those efforts was the infamous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, an event that inspired German writer Mario Giordano to write the 1999 novel Das Experiment Black Box ("The Black Box Experiment"), which in 2001 became the basis for The Experiment, a feature film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.

The protagonist, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, is Tarek Fahd, a taxi driver who answers a newspaper ad for taking part in an experiment that would get him 4000 D-Marks. The experiment is run by Dr. Klaus Thon (played by Edgar Selge), a scientist who wants to determine how would persons would act in a situation when one group has control over the other. Twenty volunteers are selected and randomly divided into two groups – twelve men, including Tarek, will spend two weeks acting as prisoners, while eight will act as guards, being given uniforms and batons, although Dr. Thon warns them not to use violence. While both groups are initially friendly towards each other, small differences gradually escalate into larger ones, with guards using all kinds of opportunities to establish their authority, often through verbal and, finally, physical violence. A sadistic man named Berus (played by Justus von Dohnányi) becomes the de facto leader of the guards and uses the absence of Dr. Thon to take the whole experiment in a much darker direction. Tarek, on the other hand, discovers his rebellious nature and becomes the de facto leader of prisoners, thus becoming the main target of Berus' wrath. The situation gets further complicated when Tarek's girlfriend Dora (played by Maren Eggert) comes to visit him and becomes the object of power-drunk guards' lust.

The Experiment was, although indirectly, based on real events and, as such, it looks more authentic than many other films with such seemingly unusual and exotic premises. Oliver Hirschbiegel, who would three years later achieve cinema immortality with Downfall, a future source of YouTube and Internet memes, directs the film in a solid manner. He can also rely on a competent cast, including Moritz Bleibtreu, a German actor who was at the zenith of his stardom at the time, although he is overshadowed by Justus von Dohnányi who plays his, both pathetic and frightening, adversary. The Experiment is a solid film, but it is deprived of true greatness by a weak and overcooked script that adds an unnecessary subplot involving a media investigation. The ending features many implausibilities and unconvincing plot developments that serve only to switch the film from serious drama into a less serious thriller and provide an opportunity for a few action scenes near the end. Despite those flaws, The Experiment had made something of an impression at the German and, partly, international box office. Following its premiere, some US critics saw its subject matter as specifically German and connected to that country's troubled history, feeling confident that its lessons couldn't be applied to the traditionally free and democratic USA. Only a few years later came the invasion of Iraq and photos of smiling US military servicemen surrounded by naked, tortured and humiliated prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. This, among other things, provided impetus for a 2010 US remake directed by Paul Scheuring and starring Adrien Brody.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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