Rating:
Home   |   Foreign Films   |   Books   |   Soundtracks   |   Previews   |   Biographies   |   Articles   |   Contributors   |   Contact
  Amy
  
Jankowicz
Das Experiment
Germany, 2001
[Oliver Hirschbiegel]
Moritz Bleibtreu, Christian Berkel, Justus von Dohnanyi
Drama / Thriller
  
You know those documentaries they do about the experiment getting half the people to be prisoners and half to be guards? Well, this is the film, and it takes this idea to its ultimate conclusion.

Tarek is a journalist whose distrust of authority leads him to take the more mundane career path of taxi driver. When he comes across an advert for this experiment, however, he visits his old editor, gets himself an investigative job and some snazzy �film-what-u-see� glasses, and joins the shabby crowd of men who have all turned up to earn their 4,000 marks for participating. They are all informed that they have waived their civil rights but will not be physically harmed.

It all starts quite jollily, like an even less interesting Big Brother, just people whooping about and wink-wink-nudge-nudgeing through their roles. The scientists, however, are pleased to find that as the days go by, the participants� sense of reality begins to diminish and the guards become as obsessed with keeping order as Tarek is with breaking it.

Perhaps there are a lot of those films about whose theme tends to say �bad BAD human nature, bad!� a lot, but this one certainly gets the message across with terrifying intensity. The story draws you in with the hideous, if not utterly surprising, souring of the milk of human kindness.

At most points I simply did not want to look away, however the film did itself no favours with the inclusion of a fairly unnecessary romance, flashbacks to which really broke the tension. Apart from a couple of minor plot and characterisation details, this film could have functioned much better by ditching the lurve and not letting up on us. And sadly, those cool video-glasses didn�t end up having much of a function at all, which made them really quite pointless and ended up detracting from the realism of the film. Despite those issues, this was a really great and thoroughly gripping watch, with nice humorous moments and absolutely excellent explorations of character.
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1