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.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Warning: if you haven’t seen this yet – and my perfect imaginary reader really should have - mild structural spoilers are inevitable (though I’ll not outright spoil a certain important plot point).

Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has perhaps chosen a bad night for starting a long drive through the American South northwards. A car crashes into hers, and when she wakes up, she finds herself chained in what looks like some sort of underground prison cell.

Her captor (John Goodman), a man we will later learn is named Howard, seems appropriately unhinged. As far as he tells it, he saved Michelle’s life when he grabbed her out of the wreck of her car and brought her to his private underground fallout shelter, for there’s supposedly been some sort of chemical or biological attack which supposedly killed everyone on the surface. Which doesn’t really explain the chain around Michelle’s ankle if you ask me, but what do I know about etiquette?

After a time, and some grumbling about a lack of proper thankfulness, Howard does let her free. Turns out there’s another man down in the shelter too. Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) did some work for Howard and happened to be at the right place at the right time to be let in when something he isn’t clear about but that looked dangerous to him happened. For a time, Michelle plays house with Howard and Emmett, but the situation and Howard are too off, and there’s too little information for her to ever lose her distrust. The question is, what kind of crazy is Howard? The harmless lonely, type who just happens to be paranoid about catastrophes and is for once right? The kind who kidnaps people and pretends to save them from something terrible? And even if there’s something going on outside – what exactly is it?

Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane is a rather wonderful film. For most of its running time, it is a thriller realized as a chamber play, carried by a sharp script that is very good at suggesting terrible as well as perfectly harmless explanations for a lot of things going on, and by performances as good as you’ll find them in a genre movie. Winstead (whom I’ve never seen give a bad or even a mediocre performance) not just makes Michelle’s confusion, anger, and panic palpable but also perfectly realizes the moments when Michelle stops being the person things are done to and finds the strength and determination to act until a decision she makes in the last scene that should be way too over the top heroic to be believable feels like the natural consequence of her growth. She and Goodman’s (right now in a big late career high when it comes to the consistency and quality of his work) sad, frightening, crazy, frightened and mysterious Howard are perfect foils for each other, neither ever attempting to overbear the other actor. Gallagher’s performance isn’t quite as obviously great, but he’s so on point in his interactions with the other two it’s difficult to find any fault in his performance.


For the first hour or more, Trachtenberg escalates the tension in the bunker expertly, with stakes and scale of the proceedings subtly escalating until things come to a head and the film turns into a very different, bigger kind of story (whose precise nature shall remain undisclosed) the director and his lead actress convey just as well. To me, this is exactly how the sort of twisty thriller so many films try to be right now should be directed and written, with a big twist that doesn’t turn everything that came before into nonsense but gives it an additional dimension.

In short: Hush (2016)

After a bad break-up deaf mute – and no, happily the film’s not just using this as a gimmick - writer Maddie (Kate Siegel, who also co-wrote the film with her husband, director Mike Flanagan) has moved into the splendid isolation of a house in the woods. It’s not quite as out of the way as these houses often are in horror films: the nearest neighbours (Samantha Sloyan and Michael Trucco) are in walking distance, there’s working Wi-Fi, and even the police seems to be relatively close.

Nonetheless, Maddie soon finds herself in trouble. A serial killer (John Gallagher Jr.) wants to play home invasion with what must look like an easy victim to him; turns out the bastard just might have bitten off more than he can chew.

So, Mike Flanagan’s a bit of a great director, isn’t he? Leaving the supernatural elements of his earlier films behind, this one’s a splendid variation on the home invasion movie, though spiced up with more siege elements in the classic Carpenter (or classic-classic Hawks) style, and avoiding everything I dislike about most home invasion movies. So the subtext about the evil of poor people is replaced by some rather more interesting commentary about various kinds of isolation, the suburban yuppie vacuum protagonist by a deftly written author who is actually likeable, and the sub-genre’s love for sadism is replaced with less unpleasant yet sturdier thriller gestures.

That last point doesn’t mean Hush is a film that pulls its punches: Maddie and the other characters still go through a lot of horrible stuff but Flanagan has such a tight control over the material he reaches greater effect through being less sensationalist. This tightness is one of the film’s greatest strengths and feels very much like script and direction working in perfect concert at keeping things lean but never too lean. There’s something fearsomely effective about the handful of scenes the film uses to introduce Maddie, with no wasted line in the script, no wasted gesture in Siegel’s – rather fantastic – performance yet still the film avoids the impression of simplifying overmuch.

That’s really Hush in a nutshell: sharp writing that doesn’t need to make its characters stupid, and tight yet elegant direction meet excellent acting (Siegel’s opponent as portrayed by John Gallagher Jr. is nearly as impressive as she is, and stays threatening even though he’s never played as being superhuman) and turn the film into something which transform quite a few played-out tropes into something that feels alive again.