The Belko Experiment is a 2016 horror thriller directed by Greg McLean and written and produced by James Gunn, running 89 minutes on a five million dollar budget and grossing around eleven million worldwide. It stars John Gallagher Jr. as Mike Milch, Tony Goldwyn as COO Barry Norris, Adria Arjona as Leandra Florez, John C. McGinley as Wendell Dukes, and Melonie Diaz as new hire Dany Wilkins, with Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn and David Dastmalchian filling out the office. The premise is brutally simple: eighty American employees of Belko Industries in Bogotá, Colombia are sealed inside their office building and informed over the intercom that the tracking implants in their skulls, supposedly installed as kidnapping insurance, are in fact explosives. Start killing each other, or the voice starts detonating heads.

I came to this with genuinely high hopes, because the trapped, forced-to-fight, battle royale subgenre is one of my absolute favourites. There is something about a confined space, an impossible rule set, and ordinary people discovering exactly who they are under pressure that I will never get tired of. I will watch any film that offers me that.

Which is precisely the difficulty. The pool of these films is enormous and it is deep. If you are going to enter it, you either need to execute exceptionally well, or you need to bring an idea nobody has tried. The Belko Experiment does neither. It is competently made, briskly paced, and never boring, and it is also queueing politely behind a dozen better films with the same shape. The workplace angle is a nice hook, and the film gets some good dark comedy out of the corporate framing, but it never develops into a genuine perspective on anything.

Where it does show real nerve is with Dany Wilkins. The new employee, on her first day, spends the film as the quietly resourceful presence in the background: cutting the power in the basement, outmanoeuvring people, staying alive through wit rather than force. The film builds her into what feels unmistakably like a survivor's arc, and then, near the end, she steps out of an elevator and Barry simply shoots her in the head. No fanfare. No last stand. My immediate reaction was irritation, but on reflection, it is the smartest choice the script makes, deliberately refusing to hand you the tidy narrative it spent an hour constructing.

The practical effects are strong throughout, particularly for a film at this budget level, and the standout moment is Leandra hacking Wendell's face apart with an axe. Watching John C. McGinley, an actor I associate almost entirely with Doctor Cox, meet that particular end is genuinely startling, and I will be carrying that image around for a while.