The Experiment (2010)

Paul T. Scheuring's 2010 picture arrives as the second adaptation of the same grisly premise, following Oliver Hirschbiegel's German version and trailing the Stanford prison experiment behind both like a receipt. Adrien Brody plays a protester with principles and a need for cash. Forest Whitaker plays a forty-two-year-old man who still lives with his mother and finds, inside the role of guard, the first authority he has ever held. The arrangement is familiar. The machinery is sound.

The ensemble casts a wide net, drawing performers of color into substantial roles without making a spectacle of the fact. This is a film about twenty-six men in a concrete building, and it is content to remain so. The lone woman of consequence drifts past the edges as a girlfriend waiting at the end of the ordeal, and the screenplay has no interest in her. There is no queer presence to speak of, no reckoning with race beyond a cellmate's Aryan Brotherhood tattoo, no environmental conscience, and no curiosity about the body or the diagnosed mind as sites of identity.

What remains is money. Fourteen thousand dollars is the film's entire political horizon, the sum that turns ordinary men into jailers and the only lever the story bothers to identify. That is a faint grumble about compensation, not an indictment of anything larger, and the movie is comfortable leaving it there. Scheuring trusts his premise to do the work. The beatings arrive on schedule, the cruelty escalates on schedule, and no character ever pauses to explain the lesson. The result is a competent, grim, thoroughly unlecturing thriller, and we are left to file it accordingly.