The Belko Experiment (2016)

The office drones of the US company Belko Industries working in an office block rather far outside of Bogotá in Colombia are looking forward to another boring day doing the sort of vaguely defined human resources work whose use the people actually involved can barely comprehend. Their day begins rather peculiar, though, for there’s a new, heavily armed troop of guards securing the place, turning away all non-American employees at the gate for “security reasons”.

Once the work day has actually started, a voice over the building’s intercom calmly demands of the employees to kill two among their number, or more of them will be killed instead. What sounds like a sick joke becomes rather more disturbing when the building is completely sealed off from the outside by automated metal shutters. And that’s before our protagonists learn that the tracking devices implanted into their necks to dissuade the local gangs from kidnappings are actually explosives built to make a nasty mess out of one’s head.

Not surprisingly, panic and general human shittiness ensues, with people generally tending to one of two factions: one, let’s call them the ones with souls, kinda-sorta lead by Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) want to try and find some way to escape or seek help. The other group, very much dominated by the company’s local ex-military COO Barry (Tony Goldwyn), is set to break into the security guard’s armoury and decide whom to murder to satisfy the disembodied voice very, very quickly. Barry does the expected mumbling about hard choices all men in power begin when it is time to sacrifice others for their interests, so everything is set up for a bit of a massacre, or “just another day at the office”, like we called it in one of my former places of employ.

Watching The Belko Experiment, one might start speculating that its writer James Gunn has developed a bit of a hankering for the more drastic films he made before he started working for Marvel on the (decidedly beloved by me, as well as millions) Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Directed by Australian Greg McLean in his usually efficient and effective manner, The Belko Experiment is a film with an angry, gory streak, full of the kind of black humour I find difficult not to read as a product of frustration with the world and the people inhabiting it right now.

In its bloody, fast and furious way, McLean’s film is really rather fun, as bizarre as that sounds as a description of a film in which nearly eighty people die in exceedingly bloody ways, quite a few of them deftly drawn as human beings by Gunn’s script and a bunch of talented actors. Even the characters that are outright psychopaths or sociopaths (including a memorably intense and brutal performance by John C. McGinley) have reasons – well, excuses, if we’re being honest – for what they do, so there’s a feeling of actual stakes to the action and the carnage.


In spirit, The Belko Experiment reminds me of certain violently satiric and angry movies produced by Roger Corman in the late 70s and early 80s (Death Race 2000 certainly comes to mind), despite its decided lack of camp appeal. There’s a comparable degree of honest anger and frustration under the artfully polished surface, at least, that makes the film more effective than many comparable movies about people locked in somewhere having to play sadistic games, as well as a rather clear-eyed idea of how fascism works in practice.