The Killing Room starts as four ordinary volunteers who have signed up to be part of a psychological research experiment & lead into a small white room, the four strangers have never met each other before & that each get on with filling in a questionnaire. A Dr. Phillips (Peter Stormare) enters the room & give a little speech about the purpose of the study & then suddenly takes out a gun & shoots one of the volunteers through the head killing her. Panic sweeps the room & Dr. Phillip's leaves, the door is locked behind him leaving the three remaining volunteers trapped inside with a dead body. All part of an extreme experiment to test how far a person can be pushed casualties were inevitable, but what is the ultimate purpose of the experiment & who does Dr. Phillip's work for?
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman this psychological thriller apparently had the working title Manbreak & tires to be clever & even a little topical by using emotive issues & themes that are reported all to regularly in the world's media, while it tries to be shocking & clever it isn't & I have to say I thought it was pretty crap. For the first 80 odd minutes of this 90 odd minute film there's little to talk about, four people in a very bland white room, one gets killed with the majority of the rest of the time just spent on them talking with scenes of Dr. Phillip's & his scientist mates (we know they are scientist's because they wear long white laboratory coats even though there's no laboratories anywhere to be seen) watching them & as a counter balance to their coldness fresh young recruit Emily Reilly doesn't like what she see's, this goes on & on for what seems like hours. At least in a film like Saw there traps & puzzles while here in The Killing Room there is nothing & it's incredibly dull & repetitive to watch. Then there's the final 10 minutes, oh God the final 10 minutes. It turns out that the nasty US Government are running this strange experiment to find the next wave of homegrown suicide bombers or civilian weapons as the men in suits (& long white laboratory coats) call them. What on Earth makes the them think putting people though this will suddenly turn them into suicide bombers? It's a reach stretch to say that because someone is willing to sacrifice themselves in a very controlled situation that they will then happily commit suicide for you & kill potentially thousands of innocent people in the process. Aren't suicide bombers fanatics & extremist's that would be willing to die for their cause? The twist just doesn't work & the idea of using the subject of suicide bombers as a cheap twist is in bad taste, The Killing Room is a film with a twist that tries to have a point & meaning but comes across as not having a damned clue. The character's are as lifeless & basic as you can imagine, it's hard to root for any of the volunteers & the scientist's (hey, they do wear those laboratory coats so they are scientist's) come across as very cold & inhuman. I suppose the 'now for phase 2' ending leaves things open for a sequel, I shudder the very thought.
Event though 90% of The Killing Room is set in a single, plain white run of the mill room director Liebesman still manages to make this thing look ugly with a constantly twitching camera, fast edits & deliberately out of focus extreme close-up foregrounds obscuring the character's. There's a bit of blood splatter but no real violence or gore worth mentioning. An extremely repetitive, bland & dull film with a ridiculous twist that didn't work The Killing Room is also lacking in tension & suspense as my major emotion while watching it was boredom. Also I don't know if it was just my copy but a lot of the dialogue sounded muffled as the three volunteers whispered to each other in increasingly panicked tones, I actually found it quite hard to understand what was being said on many occasions.
Filmed in late 2007 The Killing Room wasn't released anywhere until 2009 & it's easy to see why there were no takers for over a year, not a very good film & not a particularly easy sell as nothing really happens in it. It would certainly be hard to cut a decent trailer for it that made it look exciting. The acting is alright & rather surprisingly Nick Cannon is actually the husband of pop superstar diva Mariah Carey. Timothy Hutton once won an Oscar while Peter Stormare is better than this.
The Killing Room is a terrible psychological thriller that tries to be clever & shocking & emotive, it fails. A really boring thriller set in a single room full of faceless character's & a dumb twist ending just to round off the torment.
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