The Experiment (2001)

The Experiment, Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2001 adaptation of Mario Giordano's novel Black Box, arrives with a premise borrowed from the Stanford prison experiment and a temperament borrowed from the European art house's long love affair with humiliation. Twenty volunteers, a simulated prison, a professor who will not stop the study until the violence peaks. The machinery is efficient. Moritz Bleibtreu plays Tarek, a journalist with a camera hidden in his glasses, and the film tracks his descent from provocateur to captive with the patience of a documentary and the cruelty of a fable. It is a well-made film about a bad idea, and it knows it.

The film contains none of the modern cultural signaling that a contemporary retelling would supply. The cast is uniformly white and German, and no effort is made to correct this. The women, a scientist and a girlfriend, are present without being argued about. Race never enters the frame. Neither does climate, nor wealth inequality, nor any sustained critique of capital, though a media baron lurks at the edges. The nudity and the shaved heads serve degradation, not affirmation. A guard's collapse into madness is a plot mechanism, not a portrait of a mind. The film's relationship to history is fictional throughout: it adapts a novel that adapts a study, which is not the same as rewriting the record.

The result is a film that lectures no one. It shows a room full of men discovering what authority does to them and lets the audience do the arithmetic. Roger Ebert admired it while finding the outcome foreordained. That is a fair verdict. The film is grim, controlled, and free of sermons, which in the current climate reads almost as an artifact from another era. A sommelier would call it austere. I would call it austere as well, and leave it there.