Exam (2009)

Exam arrives from 2009, a British chamber piece in which eight hopefuls sit in a windowless room, given eighty minutes and a single sheet of paper that turns out to be blank. Stuart Hazeldine wrote and directed with an unusual degree of control, and his stated intent was to divide the group along race, culture, gender, and worldview. The result is a film that treats human variety as combustible material. Characters are assigned names by appearance: Black, Brown, Blonde, Dark, Deaf. The casting is more diverse than the era demanded, which is something. The purpose, however, is friction, not inclusion. Race functions here as a label on a desk, and disability as a silence the others must work around.

The screenplay does carry a faint scent of corporate skepticism. Biorg, the pharmaceutical giant, runs a selection process built on deception and psychological cruelty, and the candidates spend an hour tearing at each other for a job. That is a critique of something. Yet the film ultimately endorses the company, whose cure for a pandemic is framed as a gift to humanity, and whose only problem is finding a worthy administrator. Any appetite for eating the rich cools by the final reel. The winner is a woman, chosen for her compassion and her eye for detail, though the film never pauses to make an argument about women in power. She simply wins.

The closing monologue from the Invigilator explains the miracle drug and the gift of life, tidying everything with exposition. It lectures, gently. The film is a curiosity from a transitional moment, socially aware in its casting yet incurious about what that casting might mean.