Stars: Friedrich Wildfever, Christian Berkel, Oliver Stokowski

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Summary: A journalist responds to an advert asking for four thousand people to take part in a bizarre psychological experiment... German dialogue with subtitles.

DAS EXPERIMENT, a German film about a group of 20 men who are asked to participate in a psychological test with the promise of a monetary award, centers on Tarek (Moritz Bleibtreu) a reporter who wants to write about the event and so volunteers. When he is locked in a strange prison, not to emerge for 14 days, he worries that he made a bad choice.

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Inspired by a famous 1971 psychological experiment, Oliver Hirschbiegel's German-language movie Das Experimentfinds a group of 20 volunteers randomly divided into 12 prisoners and eight guards and asked to play out their roles for a fortnight while scientists study their reactions. A conflict arises between undercover reporter Fahd (Moritz Bleibtreu), a con with a hidden agenda and the apparently mild-mannered Berus (Justus von Dohnanyi), a guard with a megalomaniac streak. The film begins as a psychological drama as ordinary people settle into the game, with joking displays of resistance by the "prisoners" greeted with increasing brutality from the "guards", but detours into suspense and horror as Fahd, who needs the experiment to get out of hand in order to make his story more saleable, deliberately ratchets up the tension between the factions only to see the situation spiral nightmarishly out of control as various test subjects in both camps edge closer to snapping.

With a terrific display of ensemble acting and unforced use of the currently popular claustrophobic semi-documentary look, Hirschbiegel's movie takes its time to get underway, with apparently irrelevant cutaways to Fahd's outside girlfriend (Maren Eggert), but works up to a powerful second half that delivers a sustained symphony of psychological and physical anguish.

On the DVD:Das Experimenton disc has an excellent-looking anamorphic widescreen transfer with English subtitles. The only extra feature is the trailer. --Kim Newman

Main Language:	German
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Trailer - 1. Original Theatrical Trailer
Subtitles:	English
Year:	2001
Release Date:	April 21, 2003
Runtime:	114 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	M T D 5087
Keywords:	Subtitled, General, Experiment, German, Thriller, Das
Genre:	Thriller