Das Experiment (Deney)

Das Experiment is a 2001 German psychological thriller directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Its screenplay, written by Mario Giordano, Don Bohlinger and Christoph Darnstädt, draws on Giordano's novel Black Box, which itself took inspiration from Philip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford prison experiment.

To study instinctive human behavior, a team of researchers locks twenty paid volunteers inside a mock prison: eight play guards, twelve play inmates. What begins as a harmless game quickly turns serious, as the men assigned to be guards start behaving like real authority figures and the violence escalates step by step. The volunteers, who came only for the money, become trapped in their roles while the scientists running the study lose control of it. The escalation depicted on screen goes well beyond the actual historical events; the initiators of the real experiment even won a lawsuit against the film's 'based on a true story' claim. Moritz Bleibtreu, Christian Berkel and Andrea Sawatzki head the cast. The film was released in Turkey on 21 June 2002, and an American remake titled The Experiment appeared in 2010.