FILM GUTTER REVIEWS - ​THE EXPERIMENT (2010)

​THE EXPERIMENT (2010)
Dir. Paul Scheuring, 96 mins

There’s a lot of tension, some powerful moments and just the sort of fine performances you might have expected from the leads. However there’s enough not quite working as well as it might in the background to hold this one back from the absolute heights. Well worth a watch, but not liable to hit your top ten.

Now, regular readers will be aware than an awful lot of our Film Gutter movies are pretty out there. Often we delve into independent films, foreign offerings or cult classics, so to find something like The Experiment feels like a mighty departure. Without wanting to sound like I’m going ‘all Hollywood’, this 2010 movie has a stellar cast, headed by Adrien Brody and Forest Whitaker, and is about as mainstream an offering as we’ve ever tackled. Then again, I still need to revisit Requiem for a Dream at some point too… *shudder*

Anyway, I’ve always been a fan of Adrien Brody’s work, and thematically this one certainly hits our brief, being a fictionalised retelling of the events of the Stanford Prison Experiment. This one always stayed with me from my days studying psychology at A-level and into degree level. The original experiment, run by Professor Philip Zimbardo, took place in 1971 and divided test subjects into the roles of either prisoner or warder to study the impact of authority and how people would react to this power dynamic and the roles they were given. The whole experiment was called off after six days after the prisoners endured psychological torture at the hands of the guards, including stripping them naked, removing their mattress, refusing to let them empty their toilet buckets, spraying them with fire extinguishers and placing them in dark cupboards for extended periods as solitary confinement. For all its flawed methodology, it’s a fascinating insight into the human condition – even Zimbardo himself said the whole thing is perhaps better viewed as a demonstration rather than a pure experiment.

So – an excellent cast, and some fascinating (and dark) real-life material to call upon. Surely The Experiment must be a banker? Well, yes and no…

Brody plays Travis, a confirmed pacifist who becomes known as prisoner number 77. Each person is taking part in the experiment to get paid ($1000 dollars a day, no less) but isn’t quite clear what the experiment actually is, apart from the fact it will last two weeks. On arrival at an out of the way location, the group is broken up into prisoners and guards and from there the mayhem simply escalates. Throughout the runtime the guards become ever more brutal and sadistic, focussing particularly on prisoner 77 and the ministrations of his nemesis Barris, played by Whitaker. What’s depicted here in the film is worse than anything from the real-life experiment, although it does largely shy away from anything too brutal – Film Gutter regular might find this one doesn’t quite have the gore or violence of some offerings, but it certainly remains an unsettling watch as the psychological warfare is played out.

So The Experiment is good, but there are still niggles that are going to hold this back from a truly exemplary grade. As an actual representation of its source material, it is very much sensationalised, although some may not find that to be a problem. Some of the characters (beside Travis and Barris) are very broadly drawn and stereotypical, which leaves a sense that there could have been more to this – nerdy comic book writer Benji feels like a prime example, and his health storyline feels like a real tack-on just to advance conflict elsewhere. Some of the guards have little to no character development, and even strong performances by Brody and Whitaker as the veneer of civilisation slips away from both of them can’t remove that feeling. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the finale, although I won’t say too much on that one for risk of spoilers. There’s a lot of elements here to suggest this could be genuinely great, but it just falls short and winds up being good.

RATING: 7/10. The Experiment is one of those films that would probably have horrified mainstream audiences, but not quite have been hard enough for an audience with more extreme tastes. There’s a lot of tension, some powerful moments and just the sort of fine performances you might have expected from the leads. However there’s enough not quite working as well as it might in the background to hold this one back from the absolute heights. Well worth a watch, but not liable to hit your top ten.