I watched it last night and what can I say but it's one of the weirdest films I've watched in a long time and I've seen some weird films. It comes from a well respected German director and has an all-German cast (English subtitles) and the premise is a group of ordinary people are put inside a makeshift prison, some of them role-playing guards and the others role-playing inmates.
Cameras film the 'action' 24/7 in a Big Brother stylee and the overseers watch to see how the subjects cope with their new environment and roles. Needless to say it quickly descends into an almost primitive scenario with the guards who have been told to keep the inmates in check but not to use violence developing ever more disgusting methods to keep the 'prisoners' in check and of course real, brutal violence is almost an inevitability.
I found this film really uncomfortable to watch. I've seen films which use much more graphic and brutal violence to make their point not to mention gore but the backdrop of this particular one was particularly disturbing. It seemed to me to be outrageously gratuitious. The speed at which the experiment dissolved into total chaos over the smallest of things made no sense to me at all. It was like the producer couldn't wait to get to the point of it all which presumably to him was to shock his audience just for the sake of it. At no point was there any explanation as to what the experiment was supposed to be about and no conclusions at the end. At the end of it I couldn't decide if I liked it or resented having been subjected to it.
The film was actually based on a real life experiment in Stanford in the US in 1971 and the German director came in for some flack from some quarters for alleged nazi overtones which I have to admit I didn't get from the film at all. There is another, later version of the film based in America which I haven't seen yet but apparently it's very toned down after the reaction to this one.
I will stop babbling now. I am kind of in shock a bit and it takes a lot for a film to do that to me these days I just wondered if anyone else had watched it (or was intending to).
Cameras film the 'action' 24/7 in a Big Brother stylee and the overseers watch to see how the subjects cope with their new environment and roles. Needless to say it quickly descends into an almost primitive scenario with the guards who have been told to keep the inmates in check but not to use violence developing ever more disgusting methods to keep the 'prisoners' in check and of course real, brutal violence is almost an inevitability.
I found this film really uncomfortable to watch. I've seen films which use much more graphic and brutal violence to make their point not to mention gore but the backdrop of this particular one was particularly disturbing. It seemed to me to be outrageously gratuitious. The speed at which the experiment dissolved into total chaos over the smallest of things made no sense to me at all. It was like the producer couldn't wait to get to the point of it all which presumably to him was to shock his audience just for the sake of it. At no point was there any explanation as to what the experiment was supposed to be about and no conclusions at the end. At the end of it I couldn't decide if I liked it or resented having been subjected to it.
The film was actually based on a real life experiment in Stanford in the US in 1971 and the German director came in for some flack from some quarters for alleged nazi overtones which I have to admit I didn't get from the film at all. There is another, later version of the film based in America which I haven't seen yet but apparently it's very toned down after the reaction to this one.
I will stop babbling now. I am kind of in shock a bit and it takes a lot for a film to do that to me these days I just wondered if anyone else had watched it (or was intending to).
) I listen to loud music through headphones and stick my head in my laptop... but I managed to watch Das Experiment
