Mike Milch and the other US employees of Belko Industries in Bogota, Columbia, arrive at the building one day to find unfamiliar security guards turning away the local Colombian staff at the gate.
Mike and his colleagues are bewildered but not excessively alarmed by this phenomenon, even though the usual head of security has no idea who the new guys are, or why they're turning the Colombian staff away. These colleagues include new employee Dany Wilkins, who reports for her first day on the job and is told that a tracking device is implanted in the base of every Belko employee's skull "in case something happens to them".
As you have no doubt surmised, Mike, Dany & Co. really should be alarmed. Once all the employees show up, a voice on the intercom instructs them to kill two of their co-workers, or else there will be consequences. Several staff attempt to flee the building, but steel shutters seal off the walls and doors, locking them all in. They ignore the announcement at first, believing it to be just a sick prank, but after the set time ends and two people have not been killed, four employees die when explosives hidden in their trackers detonate and blow their heads apart.
And this brings us to the meat of the movie, as the mysterious voice orders increasingly brutal actions on the part of the employees. It is not long battle lines are drawn between those who - with varying degrees of reluctance - decide to save themselves by doing as ordered, and those (led by Mike) who insist on trying to find some other way out of their predicament.
The Belko Experiment was written and produced (but not directed) by James Gunn, and features a talented cast that includes Michael Rooker and Gunn's brother Sean, both of whom are frequent collaborators of his and who are instantly recognisable these days for their work on the Guardians of the Galaxy films.
Of course, The Belko Experiment is a very different kind of movie to those MCU offerings. And in my opinion, not overall as successful a film.
It starts strongly, introducing several characters and - with one exception that I will discuss later - giving us some insight into who they are before things get nasty. The start of the experiment itself is also very punchy and effective. Fifteen or twenty minutes into this film, I was looking forward to a tense, claustrophobic pressure cooker like Cube.
The problem is though is that the movie doesn't seem to know what to do next. It basically just repeats the same scenario - kill your colleagues in the hope it will save yourselves, or pay the consequences - without much to vary it up. Yes, there are some wacky hijinks with Sean Gunn's character, and we have Mike's efforts to find a way out of the experiment, but these don't take up that much time - most of the movie is just about separating out 'people willing to commit murder to save themselves' (all middle aged white guys in management positions, which seems about right) and 'those not willing to do so'. Also, given horror film tropes, I felt the ending was pretty much the most formulaic and predictable kind of way they could have wrapped things up.
The final problem with the film is Dany's role within it; or perhaps her lack of one. Her introduction suggested to me that there was something going on with her beyond the apparent, an impression reinforced by the amount of time and attention the script gave her ... but there's not an actual pay-off to this. I guess the 'weirdness' of her introduction was just to show she felt uncomfortable with Belko's tracker, or something like that?
This movie is generally effective in the moment to moment, but ultimately didn't hold together that well, for me.
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