The Experiment

The Experiment (Das Experiment, 2001) is Oliver Hirschbiegel's German psychological thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Twenty men answer a well-paid ad to spend two weeks locked inside a fake prison: some are assigned to be inmates, the rest become guards. Scientists watch from behind the glass and take notes.

At first it plays like a game. Cab driver Tarek (Moritz Bleibtreu) joins to snag a story and smuggles in a hidden camera while the others settle into their roles. But hand eight ordinary men a uniform and authority, and the humiliations escalate fast, until the prisoners push back. Within days the sterile study curdles into actual violence that nobody can simply call off. There are no villains here, and that's the most disturbing part.

The script draws on Philip Zimbardo's infamous Stanford prison study and Mario Giordano's novel. The film is airless, claustrophobic and deliberately unpleasant: it isn't built to entertain so much as to ask what you would do on either side of the bars. Stream The Experiment (2001) online on iFILM.