The Experiment (2001)

This film tells the story of a psychological experiment that goes horribly wrong.It is fascinating to see the change of the psychological state of the participants. The film captivates and portrays the atmosphere very well. The things depicted are horrible, but entirely believable given the circumstances.

This German take on the Stanford prison experiment has additional layers of authenticity. Well made and interesting, masterfully acted and is much preferred to the Hollywood version.

If I say it was unwatchable, that would be a great injustice however the movie was nothing special, the story idea was not new and even within the known cliché there was no innovation. The critical problem was the very slow pace of screenplay. 2 hours is a long time for such movie, it could've been much better if they would trim the movie to something between 80 to max 90 minutes. Movie started very slow and remained slow till the end. Supposed to be shocking scenes were merely flat and unattractive. Another problem was poor character development which was worthy of a B movie and at the end there was some unanswered questions (not the good type of unanswered questions). Why the guard group had access to the outside? why they could even go home? Why no one searched them before letting them in? in one scene, one bottle of wine looked like a big deal among the guards but if they had access to the outside and apparently no one was searching them, it should not have been a big deal. Also the mysterious air force major, what was he doing among inmates? A 2 bit former reporter/taxi driver meets a woman one night in a car accident, takes her home (I buy that) and sleeps with her (I buy that too) and develops telepathy connection with her (total bull***, a rip off). The presence of this lady has nothing to do with the resolve of the movie, even when she shows up at night at the experiment facility (known as medical school), she fails play any roll in the resolve except to take the gun from one scene to another which could have been done by anyone. I guess they squeezed her in so they would not end up with an all male movie which would've been unattractive for most females or couples. Overall not a movie I can suggest even for merely a night no brainer entertainment.

I was impressed with this German made film which I found to be superior to its American copy starring Sean Penn later produced.This film is based loosely on a US sponsored experiment in which a prominent psychiatrist ran amok creating a prison in the basement of a noted liberal University. However differing from the real life experiment in which the participants, recruited from students between semesters received rather small emoluments, the movie version claims that the test subjects, recruited from newspaper ads were offered stupendous incentives for their collaboration.The film correctly states that volunteers were assigned roles and that as the experiment went on the participants fell into the roles that were given them. Indeed at one point the 'guards' kidnap one of the staff and throw her behind bars.In this version, a MI undercover agent has been inserted in the scenario in the role of a prisoner to act as a controller. He knows an escape route and can break up the experiment if he has to.There is a feel-good ending in which the mad scientist behind the experiment comes down on charges.In real life that never happened. Jocularly speaking of it a quarter century later, the real life psychiatrist hosted a US sponsored college course on psychology.