Film: Das Experiment
Release date: 4th May 2009
Certificate: 18
Running time: 114 mins
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Moritz Bleibtreu, Christian Berkel, Oliver Stokowski, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Stephan Szasz
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Studio: In2Film
Format: DVD
Country: Germany
Oliver Hirschbiegels’ debut film, Das Experiment, caused a sensation on its release in 2001. Based on Mario Giordano’s book Black Box, the story draws its influence from the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. The film gives a chilling account of the susceptibility of ordinary people to violence and corruption.
Since losing his job as a journalist, Tarek Fahd (Moritz Bleibtreu) has become a taxi driver. When he finds an advert in a newspaper offering 4000 Marks to participate in an experiment in a simulated prison, he uses the opportunity to write an undercover exposé of the experiment for his former boss.
A car crash on the way home from work unexpectedly brings Dora (Maren Eggert) into his life. When Tarek offers to take her home, the two spend the night together. Despite their instant attraction for each other they part ways - Dora to her house in Canada, Tarek to the lab.
Upon arrival at the simulated prison, Tarek meets the men he will spend the next two weeks with. Amiable and relaxed, they are all normal people from different backgrounds, with unremarkable jobs ranging from a chief executive to a school teacher. The scientists, Dr Thon (Edgar Selge) and Dr Grimm (Andrea Sawatzki), inform them they will be randomly separated into two groups: guards and prisoners. The guards must exercise total control over the prisoners but are prohibited from using violence, despite being provided with truncheons and hand cuffs. The prisoners are stripped of all their clothes, which are replaced with smocks, and they are assigned numbers before being taken to their cells where they are confined for the duration of the experiment.
The initial camaraderie among the men is quickly replaced with paranoia and hostility as the two groups struggle for dominance. The lines between reality and their own fictitious roles become blurred beyond distinction as the film reaches its shocking conclusion…
Despite its harrowing and unyielding nature, Das Experiment is a profoundly brave and challenging film. A number of the punishments inflicted on the prisoners – such as being locked in solitary confinement and being stripped naked - were actually performed by college students in the real Stanford Prison Experiment which took place in 1971 in America. The more extreme violence that appears towards the end did not actually occur in Philip Zimbardo’s experiment. Rather, Das Experiment is a representation of what could have happened if it had lasted the full two weeks. In actuality, psychologists terminated the experiment in just six days after the students began to show signs of depression and disturbed behaviour. The film should not therefore be seen as a factual account of the events that took place at the Californian University (a mistake which is often made) but as a much more complex tale about human nature.
Unlike many filmmakers, Oliver Hirschbiegel rejects the redundant approach of portraying characters as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and leaves the audience to determine the answers for themselves. He faced harsh criticism after the release of Downfall – about Hitler’s last days in his bunker - which also refused to depict its major characters as two dimensional or simply evil. Hirschbiegels’ unflinching ability to shine a light in dark places by showing the reality of people who commit horrific acts is what makes him unique. A poignant link to Nazism it blatant from the outset, at one point Schütte (Oliver Stokowski) accuses Berus (Justus von Dohnányi) of being a Nazi pig. The speed at which the guards adapt to treating the prisoners as the enemy also suggests a parallel. But the director’s goal is not to demonise Germans. Rather he is intent on communicating a universal susceptibility human beings have of losing their moral judgment. Confronting the truth head on without self deception is the only way to safeguard against atrocity.
It’s not all bleak, however. The love scenes between Dora and Tarek are genuinely beautiful - their sensual tenderness, which appears in flashbacks, the only comfort to Tarek when he’s locked in his cell. Some scenes, where they appear to each other in dreams and visions, while Tarek is confined, are only made plausible by the actors on-screen chemistry, and might otherwise look like devices to move the plot along. Tarek and Schütte’s relationship is equally moving - Stokowski’s performance is positively heart-warming.
What stands out most in this film is the subtle little hints into the characters’ personality, flaws and insecurities that are inconspicuous in their everyday lives, but become inflated and dangerous in the setting of the prison: Eckert (Timo Dierkes) letches on Dr Grimm and later tries to rape her; whilst guards laugh at Berus’s body odour, taunts later repeated by Tarek which results in Berus dragging him from his cell and urinating on him, mockingly asking him, “Now who smells?”
There is not a great deal of music in the film, however the Linkin Park track ‘One Step Closer’ played at the beginning sounds very misplaced as a sort of inelegant attempt to foreshadow the coming tensions. The swelling emotive music in the last scene somehow detracts from the utter devastation - the closing moments would have been much more poignant if they had been silent. These, though, are small imperfections in what is a well crafted film.
Thought provoking and utterly engaging, Das Experiment dextrously sweeps between moving, terrifying, life affirming and back again. Essential viewing for all film lovers. JMA
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