He goes home and shoots Sherry before collapsing. A shootout ensues and a badly wounded George emerges as the only man standing. Before Johnny arrives, Val appears with an associate to hold them up. The conspirators gather at the apartment where they are to meet Johnny and divide the money. The heist is successful, although the sharpshooter is shot and killed by a security guard. Sherry does not believe him at first but, after learning that the robbery is real, enlists her lover Val Cannon to steal the money from George and his associates. Sherry is bitter at George for not delivering on the promises of wealth he made when they married, so George hopes telling her about the robbery will impress her and keep her from leaving him. George Peatty, the teller, tells his wife Sherry about the impending robbery. Johnny assembles a team consisting of a corrupt cop, a betting window teller to gain access to the backroom, a sharpshooter to shoot the favorite horse during the race to distract the crowd and keep the winnings from being paid out, a wrestler to provide another distraction by provoking a fight at the track bar, and a track bartender. He plans to steal $2 million from the money-counting room of a racetrack during a featured race.

Peter Stormare is ruthlessly clinical as the unscrupulous experimenter, while Timothy Hutton is commanding as the volunteers’ leader, capably playing an ordinary man forced into becoming extraordinary in the face of unspeakable dangers.Johnny Clay is a veteran criminal planning one last heist before settling down and marrying Fay. It would be easy for the cast to resort to hyperventilating hysterics to create emotional effects, but the largely believable performances go a long way toward selling the movie’s nightmare scenario. But The Killing Room asks for a suspension of disbelief in order for its psychological torments to fully disturb the audience, and the film’s brief running time helps maintain that hypnotic spell until the clever final twist. On one level, Liebesman and screenwriters Gus Krieger and Ann Peacock are dealing with a wholly unrealistic scenario that could only occur in the movies - Phillips seems to always be one step ahead of his volunteers’ plans, and the film-makers’ explanation of the top-secret government facility is rather far-fetched. These conversations add an extra layer of suspense - Emily (and the audience) are watching the volunteers on a videotape, never sure if these horrific events have ended or are still going on. The only minor relief from these desperate moments comes in conversations between Dr Phillips and a potential new protege named Emily (Sevigny) who had no idea that the doctor was involved in under-the-radar government experiments meant to test the limits of the human body. Working with cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, production designer Charisse Cardenas and composer Brian Tyler, director Jonathan Liebesman has constructed a claustrophobic, riveting thriller built almost entirely out of scenes of the volunteers trapped in a sealed white room debating how they can outsmart their captors as the threat of their deaths hangs in the air. Though superficially similar to the Saw films, The Killing Room has a sickening elegance that’s entirely its own design. But once it becomes clear that Dr Phillips (Stormare), who is running the experiment, has fiendish intentions, the group must work together to keep from being killed one by one inside the room. The film’s merciless treatment of its lab-rat characters will turn off some, but audiences who savour down-and-dirty genre thrills will find this darkly compelling.įour volunteers (Cannon, DuVall, Hutton, Whigham) individually enter an almost-all-white room to take part in a paid scientific experiment. But unlike that horror franchise, The Killing Room mostly relies on psychological terror rather than blood and pain to produce its shocks. As a departure from his gory 2006 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, director Jonathan Liebesman squeezes every little ounce of mind-game intrigue from the story of four strangers who sign up for a science experiment that turns out to be much more horrifying and deadly than they could have imagined.īecause The Killing Room involves luckless subjects forced to carry out the bizarre dictates of an unseen puppet-master, this thriller will undoubtedly draw comparisons to the Saw films, which feature an elaborate puzzle game that the victims must try to outsmart if they want to live. Unremittingly gripping and unnerving, The Killing Room transforms a simple premise into a almost unbearably tense experience.

The killing room movie