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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Movie: The Belko Experiment
Director: Greg McLean
Starring: John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Melonie Diaz
Available on: Amazon Video and iTunes
The Belko Experiment is a movie that wears its social commentary on its sleeve. It’s there in the title, “The Belko Experiment,” which sounds like any number of infamous real-life social experiments. The kind that revealed something dark and sinister about our human nature, like the Stanford Prison Experiment. That 1971 behavioral trial (which got its own movie in 2015) divided participants into the roles of prisoners and guards and revealed that it does not take much provocation for those in positions of authority to dehumanize and abuse those under their control. The Belko Experiment, not being constrained by the burdens of telling a true story, takes those dark observations about who we are as people and drives them to disturbing extremes.
Belko Industries is a fairly generic American company operating in Bogota, Colombia. They … help facilitate other American companies’ hiring practices? Or something? The truth of Belko is revealed when a voice comes over the intercom and announces to the 70+ employees — regular corporate drones chit-chatting with each other over their morning coffee — that unless they kill two of their own number, they will face dire consequences. There’s some necessary going through the motions that follow: the employees think this is a prank, they scoff, they maybe take a wary look around the cubicles, but nobody takes it seriously. But then the heads of four employees randomly explode, and steel panels bar the doors and windows. The intercom voice delivers the new orders: of the 76 remaining Belko employees, 30 must be killed in two hours or else 60 will die. And we’re off to the races with one of the bloodiest horror movies in recent memory.
The paranoia and violence ramps up pretty quickly once everyone at Belko accepts that what’s happening is real. Major players emerge, including Tony Goldwyn as the company’s COO and John C. McGinley, who we saw in the beginning leering at female employees. We learn both are former special forces, and they take up the task of rounding up 30 to be killed. John Gallagher Jr. is our designated white hat who opposes the killings and must face his own moral dilemmas as a result. The rest of the cast includes Melonie Diaz, Sean Gunn, Michael Rooker, and a bunch of other familiar faces. There’s a ruthlessness to the casting: if an actor is wholly unfamiliar to you, odds are they’re going to be one of the masses who get killed.
The “social experiment” at Belko pretty quickly becomes indistinguishable from the serial horrors of your average Saw film. As moral quandaries go, kill-or-be-killed is neither novel nor, once you get into the nuts and bolts of it, all that fascinating. Not even when the movie tries to sell the corporate setting as a kind of social satire. What sets The Belko Experiment apart — on the occasions when it does set itself apart — is the sheer brutality of its execution. There is precious little finesse in the way that the killings are carried out; which is honestly good, because the few moments where director Greg McLean goes for finesse, it just feels tasteless. McLean is no stranger to brutality as a calling card. His Wolf Creek, the 2005 Australian horror movie about a pair of abducted young women who face off with a psychopath in the Outback, was similarly unremarkable from the torture-porn movies that were popular at the time, but it was carried off with such brutal simplicity that it demanded notice.
The Belko Experiment has been received with the same kind of mixed welcome Wolf Creek got. It’s nasty, brutal, nihilistic, and eager to wallow in the worst of humanity to make the point that … well, that humanity is the worst. It’s not going to be for every taste, to put it mildly, but there is a rawness to its horror that demands attention. It’s not admirable, but it is effective.
