Raindance Festival 2009: EXAM Review

It's Cube meets The Apprentice, as eight high-flying candidates for an exclusive job at a mysterious corporation arrive for the final round of the selection process. In a basement room, devoid of artificial light, they must sit an exam over 80 minutes to answer just one question, with only one answer. They must not talk to the invigilator or guard standing by the door, spoil their paper in any way or leave the room. Breaking these rules will result in disqualification. The young hotshots turn over their exam papers only to discover they are totally blank. As the group starts to argue over what the answer (or indeed the question) is, tensions inevitably rise and things quickly turn nasty.
 
An interesting premise from British director Stuart Hazeldine has the stage set for a twisty, puzzle of a sci-fi B-movie, as moral quandaries arise from the uneasy set-up. Sadly no sooner have the candidates picked up their pencils, than the whole thing unravels. Astonishingly clunky dialogue from the start never allows the slightest suspension of disbelief as these apparently exceptional students bumble around from banal observation to another, with all the alacrity of a toddler trying to put wooden blocks in the wrong shaped holes. The candidates themselves fail to raise any sympathy for their plight either, mechanically reciting the often dreadful lines and displaying their best approximation of acting. Ironically, it all feels rather like an amateur dramatics production at secondary school. Any tension is instantly undermined by below par performances, struggling with the terrible script.

At one point someone mentions that maybe they've all been chosen for this final test because they're from different ethnic, socio-demographic and, bizarrely, hair colour backgrounds and so have different skills. Unwittingly raising a major weakness of the film, they all feel like just that, blunt stereotypes: the Asian, the white guy, the black guy, the brunette, the blonde etc. If they are meant to be symbolic of different facets of our society in some way, it's left unexplored, with a worrying closing implication that doesn't really work either. Confining the action to a single room for an entire film means you had better make sure it's full of pretty damn interesting people, not painful bores.

After 80 minutes (in agonising real time) of watching these simultaneously smug and idiotic candidates shouting, hitting and moaning you might think that the payoff would be something of a revelation. It isn't. If you remember the schoolyard puzzles that Simon (Jeremy Irons) taunts John McClane with in Die Hard With A Vengeance ("As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives...") then you'll have some clue as to how banal and plain stupid the conclusion is. Even a catastrophically hung-over John McClane had the good sense to realise he was being made to play silly kids games.

Striving for a significance that isn't there, and hinting at insights into humanity that amount to nothing, Exam leaves you feeling cheated. Fail.