The Killing Room (Jonathan Liebesman, 2009)

Four disparate individuals are invited to a secret facility to take part in psychological testing of an increasingly disturbing nature, monitored all the while by hidden profilers.
I was hoping here for either a serious attempt to engage with the theme of the ruthlessness of unfettered governmental mindgames on guinea pigs, in the mould of Das Experiment - after all, just as that film was based on real events, so The Killing Room flippantly makes direct reference to the CIA's MKULTRA Cold War project. Failing that, turning the set-up into out-and-out survival mayhem a la Cube would have probably done the trick too. But Liebesman is a hack, and manages neither successfully. Chloë Sevigny and Peter Stormare, as the morally compromised testers, do play edgy cat-and-mouse for a while, but the eventual resolution is badly undermined by the weakness of the underlying premise.

4/10