NOTE: This little essay discusses the 2009 film Exam, and contains spoilers pretty much from the first sentence. If you imagine you might someday watch this film and fear spoilers, read no further.
Exam is a small little movie I’d describe as Sci Fi, though it’s main thrust is mindfuck/thriller territory. It’s one of a few recent SF films (another that pops to mind being Cube) which combines low budgets made to look slick by the simple expedient of setting the entire movie in one room, more or less, and the plot engine of several disparate people who must work together despite mistrust and paranoia to surmount the plot obstacle. They’re also usually extremely high-concept, with tight little premises that appeal to me. I love a story that turns on one simple but potentially brilliant device.
When I was a kid in grammar school, we were once given a test (this might have been 3rd or 4th grade, I forget). We were told to read all of the instructions before beginning the test. There were about 50 instructions/questions on the page, starting with “Write your name on top of this sheet” or something similar. If you read all the way to the bottom, the last instruction said “Do not perform any of the instructions before this one”. In other words, the whole point of the test was to teach us that good drones in society always pay very close attention to instructions — the kids who started working immediately and didn’t read all the way through failed, where those of us who read everything and smugly put our pencils down passed.
To this day, I’m not sure if passing was a good thing. Am I smart, or just exceptionally well-trained by my societal masters?
Anyway, this is the spine of Exam‘s plot. In an unspecified future where an unnamed pandemic virus is held at bay only by viral suppressor drugs manufactured by a huge and powerful corporation, eight “candidates” for a job at that pharmaceutical corporation are brought into a room to take a final test to determine which of them gets the job. There are eight desks, eight sheets of paper marked CANDIDATE 1, CANDIDATE 2 and so on, and eight pencils. The Invigilator (my new favorite word) tells them that there is one question before them and one answer is required, and then gives them three rules: 1. Don’t speak to him or to the (armed) guard standing in the room, ready to escort losers out; 2. Don’t (voluntarily) leave the room under any circumstances; and 3. Don’t spoil your exam sheet. The Invigilator then asks “Any Questions?”, waits a beat, and tells them they have eighty minutes to begin. When they turn their exam sheets over, they are blank. Ooooh, mindfuck – they have 80 minutes to figure out what the question is.
That hooked me, I admit it.
I won’t go into the twists and turns here: One of the candidates sits for about thirty seconds and starts to write what appears to be a grammar-school-level admissions letter: “I deserve to be … ” is as far as she gets before the guard escorts her from the room, wailing and crying, because she “spoiled” her paper. By writing on it. Another candidate then figures out that none of the rules precludes them from speaking to each other or moving around – they must only avoid speaking to the guard or the Invigilator. So they start to cooperate to figure out what the question is, and slowly descend into paranoia and violence as each desperately tries to be the one picked for a job that is described in terms that make you think these folks would gladly sell their mothers to work for this corporation. People get ejected from the exam room by fair means and foul, fights break out, two people are tied to chairs and tortured, and eventually someone gets shot by the rather prominently displayed Chekov’s Gun in the guard’s holster, when someone figures out that the rules prevent them from speaking to the guard, not from touching him or even taking his property.
In the end, only one candidate is left, and she has the final revelation: The one question they were asked was “Any questions?” She answers “No,” and is offered the job, which involves rolling out a cure for the pandemic. In other words, the whole exam was a piece of psychological bullshit.
Actually, the “twist” there didn’t bother me, and I actually quite liked it: I think the candidates’ assumption that the question must be some ruthlessly clever bit that would require some crazy solution mirrors the audience’s assumptions, and thus works well. And, frankly, if you think about it there’s no reason this exact solution shouldn’t occur to you the moment the exam sheets turn up to be blank (I didn’t, but I think it’s possible some will). However, this doesn’t mean I think the movie worked. It didn’t, for a lengthy list of reasons:
1. Apparently you can never have a group of people in a room without people being beaten, killed, maimed, and tortured. One flaw with setups involving strangers in competition is writers too often just dance everyone into violent outbursts and sociopathic behavior for no goddamn reason. It’s one thing if the characters are in competition to survive and know it – if you’re being killed off by invisible Predators or something, I can understand why you’d be willing to murder a complete stranger in order to gain a small advantage. But the characters in this movie, no matter how personally desperate, are applying for a job. With a corporation. Sure, maybe it pays millions and offers Sex Robot secretaries or something, but murdering each other within an hour and twenty minutes of meeting each other? It’s forced.
The other problem with this approach to creating conflict, aside from it being very amateurish (violence being the easiest conflict there is) is that it totally takes the narrative away from the single most interesting aspect of the story: What the hell is the question, and how are they going to figure it out? The characters start off well, working together in mildly clever ways to try and suss out the secret, but quickly start to bicker and talk. They have 80 goddamn minutes to figure out something they’re apparently willing to kill for, and they just jabber their way through about 60 of them, insulting each other, playing head games. I would have much preferred a lot more cleverness in trying to figure out the question and cleverness in how the corporation stays one step ahead of them, toying with them. Instead you get an hour of not-exactly scintillating conversation, wherein characters go from quiet and serious to screeching and violent likethat.
2. The reason I am watching this movie is the premise, not to get to know the characters. Waaaayyyy too much of this story is the characters talking, reacting to each other, insulting each other, discussing things. In a story like this, the sole attraction is the premise – The Question. The rest of it is a waste of time unless it ultimately feeds into that. Now, sure, you don’t want a collection of empty characters just trying solutions. You have to give the people in the room personalities, back stories, tics. But the audience does not need to know them. The writer does. If, say, one character is a professional gambler who takes chances every day, you do not want to have someone say on-screen “He’s a gambler. He takes chances every day.” You want us to think, at some point, I wonder if that guy’s a gambler. The words he uses sometimes, the way he approaches everything as a bet. You know, the old “Show don’t tell” saw. We should get snippets of personality and backstory in the course of solving the puzzle, not by stopping the puzzle-solving dead in its tracks for forty minutes.
3. The ending completely borks the story. These characters are supposedly the cream of the crop vying for an amazing job that will change their lives and bring them untold rewards. The CEO of the company is supposedly very picky about who he hires, thus the strange and grueling system for choosing them. All well and good, except most of the characters, as presented, are completely unsuitable for any job, much less the job described at the end of the film. The first runner-up, in fact, is a sociopathic asshole throughout – why in the world wouldn’t he be disqualified immediately?
But the real kicker is that twist. I enjoyed the twist, in the same way I enjoyed that test all those years ago. But passing the Exam revealed almost nothing about the person. Anyone who happened to be in the right frame of mind might have noticed that little trick, and in the end the candidate who does finally notice does so by sheer brainstorm. There were a few events to set up clues for her, yes, but none of them had anything to do with the conflict between the characters. They might have all stayed calmly at their desks for 80 minutes and she’d still have had the same clues and the same revelation.
Finally, something not big enough to earn a full numbered point but still annoying: The Moron Lines. In the beginning The Invigilator lists the rules. Multiple times during the rest of the film the characters repeat these rules to make sure the audience understands them – minus one point for treating me like an asshole, buddy. Even worse, when the characters do this, they cut to a flashback of The Invigilator speaking the rule! Just in case! You were not! Paying! Any! Attention! AT ALL! ARRGHHH, JEFF SMASH.
Seriously: I can remember things said to me five minutes ago. Really, I can. It would have been fun, though, if part of the story had involved the characters trying to remember what The Invigilator had actually said, and getting it mixed up. But then there would have been less time for everyone to talk endlessly about how much they disliked each other while time dribbled off the clock.
In the end, I did enjoy this movie. It was just disappointing. I’m a sucker for these sorts of stories and I’ll likely keep watching/reading them, but I’ll also likely keep bellyaching about them, too. Carry on.