Release Date: September 18, 2002
Starring: Moritz Bleibtreu, Christian Berkel, Justus von Dohnanyi, Edgar Selge, Andrea Sawatzki, Maren Eggert
Directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Written by: Don Bohlinger, Christop Darnstädt, Mario Giordano
Distributed by: Samuel Goldwyn Films
MPAA Rating: NR
More than a year before I saw Das Experiment, I wrote that one of the essentials of a great movie is its ability to completely immerse the viewer. While formalist film theorists would probably take me to task for such a statement, I stand by it -- especially having seen Das Experiment, Oliver Hirschbiegel's visceral, guttural psychological thriller about an experiment in prison behavior gone totally wrong.
Key to this experiment, which was actually produced at Stanford University in 1971, and to Hirschbiegel's fictional recreation of it in Das Experiment (which is actually based on Mario Giordano's novel Black Box, which in turn is based on the Stanford event), is that distortion of reality -- a quality of total immersion in entertainment that Hirschbiegel achieves with frightening ease.
The background is this: In August 1971, Stanford researchers planned a two-week experiment that arbitrarily divided a group of twenty-four young men into two categories, guards and prisoners. These individuals were then thrown into a mock prison created in the basement of a psychology building and their actions observed via round-the-clock surveillance; the experiment was canceled after only six days, however, because it quickly spun out of control.
Hirschbiegel's film transplants the entire scenario to modern-day Germany, under the guidance of the steely-eyed Professor Thon (Edgar Selge) and his icy assistant Dr. Grimm (Andrea Sawatzki). A Cologne cab driver and ex-journalist named Tarek Fahd (Moritz Bleibtreu of Run Lola Run) enlists in the experiment after convincing his former editor there's a scoop to be had, but his situation is complicated when he literally runs into Dora (Maren Eggart), the girl of his dreams, the night before.
Then, from the first day of the experiment, the film becomes a gripping study of descent into the ugly bowels of human nature. At first the guards and prisoners are chummy, eager to ignore the rules of the simulation, but soon things get worse. The guards, led by a skinny, twitchy, bug-eyed fellow named Berus (Justus von Dohnanyi), begin to enact their will by means of humiliation, spraying the prisoners with fire extinguishers and forcing them to sleep naked and without their beds. Tarek, sensing a better story, escalates the situation against the wishes of his ex-Air Force cellmate Steinhoff (Christian Berkel), unaware of just how sadistic things will get.
For the most part, any viewer with any knowledge of the plot ahead of time will have no trouble discerning the course of the story -- it isn't until the final moments when things become truly unpredictable. But the more important and more fascinating aspect of Das Experiment is the transformation of the experiment's participants, from regular joes to totalitarian prison guards and frightened, psychologically abused inmates. Hirschbiegel cunningly exacts this marvelous shift right before the audience's eyes, like a magician performing a sort of snuff magic trick, so that at some indiscernible point in the second act, the viewer no longer regards the cast as participants in an experiment but as genuine guards and prisoners.
It's the ultimate act of realism, or realism-within-realism, where the physical boundaries of the movie world become transparent to the viewer, and the frightening situation on-screen seems to envelop the audience in their seats. Although a number of fictional elements have been added, like Tarek's spontaneous lover Dora, to ratchet up the entertainment level, Hirschbiegel, a veteran television director, has a trained and patient eye when it comes to craftsmanship. Even with regard to the clichéd and almost requisite love story -- someone once told me that 90 percent of all mainstream narrative movies have a heterosexual love story -- there is not the sense of being spoon-fed the liberties of the classical Hollywood narrative. Hirschbiegel's inclusion of, for instance, the romance, is for a purpose, as he includes everything in the film: to heighten the terror and draw out the suspense.
Likewise, the movie has no politics, for which I am both thankful and dismayed. On one hand, it's interesting to see a thematically charged movie like this play out as a bare-bones narrative, one that, once it gets into the prison setting, moves far too quickly to stop and smell the roses of symbolism. On the other hand, this is a German film, and I was overwhelmed to discover that the themes of totalitarianism and social experiment were left up to me to decipher. (Of course, there is a positive side to this, which is that when one of the inmates, in desperation, calls a guard a "fucking Nazi pig," the resulting silence is deafening.) Extraordinarily, for a European film, there is actually quite a bit of violence, which appears to go contrary to the post-World War II identity of a nation that has shunned its once-great but now-tarnished reputation. Or is it just a coincidence that a German filmmaker undertook a fictional movie about this experiment? The film never hints at anything greater than its fictional universe.
Within that universe, though, the production design is as haunting as the implications of Hirschbiegel's film. The prison itself is sparse and nearly surreal, constructed of smoky Plexiglas and utilitarian supports, and buried within the isolated confines of the psychology department's basement. It recalls the dungeons of ancient times, when humans were supposedly less refined, which sheds a startling light on the actions of the characters. In one scene, Tarek is taken into a back room, where the guards shave his head and then urinate on him as punishment for his aggressive attitude -- at the same time, the viewer can almost feel time slipping back through the centuries.
But in fact it is the present day, which means that there must be something timeless at work within the subconscious of the human mind. The only substantial fault of Das Experiment is that it never bothers to mention what that might be, although it's not as if the audience needs any help, having already become addicted to the same cruelties witnessed nightly on reality television shows. Rather, Hirschbiegel's film is truly haunting because the viewer never questions the plausibility of the experiment and its "results" -- like much of real life, the audience simply assumes that human nature is inherently ugly.
all contents © 2002 Craig Roush