Wednesday 31 January 2018

The Belko Experiment

Greg McLean, 2016, USA-Columbia
Writer – James Gunn

In an office building in a suspiciously remote office block in Columbia, eighty employees suddenly find themselves sealed in and told by an ominous intercom voice that they must kill each other. It covers similar ground as Joe Lynch’s ‘Mayhem’ where office life becomes a bloodbath. It’s a fine horror-drama set-up full of possibilities but James Gunn here doesn’t seem to know how to write the best of it and forgets to sprinkle some jazz to make it sparkle. It’s decently if uninterestingly played but its conclusions – a group of locked-in people will always revert to and be overcome with violence – aren’t fresh and there is little to distinguish its initially promising premise. Its satirical high-point is a fight against a projection of a company promotional film, but it ends up being just another tokenly decent guy’s revenge fantasy against the overlords.

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