The Killing Room

I've rather enjoyed this North American film. The main idea is nothing too new: some people locked in a room, shocked and fearful undergo a series of mysterious tests, and failing means dying.
Sure you're thinking now of Cube, Fermant's Room... (another very good film springs to my mind, but I can't remember the name now), and you're damn right, but there are some elements here that sure gives it a special touch.

This film makes it rather clear since the beginning (to us, not to the prisoners) who are the guys behind the experiments, the American Secret Services are conducting this crazy thing (well not too unusual), and they're doing it as part of the MKUltra project. Yes, this is an interesting take, imagining a world where MKUltra did stop only at an official level, but where some dark government agency has kept it going under the covers all these years, is something that makes good sense to me.

Spoiler warning starts here
What I liked most of this film is the final part, when the aim of the "research" is unveiled. They're trying to select people willing to sacrifice their own lives for the others, people that would have the psychological basis for being trained into "martyrs", "suicide bombers"... Well, when you have nuclear weapons why do you need "human weapons" you could ask... as nuclear weapons have sort of a global effect their damage would end up reaching your own people, the effect of "human bombs" can be better focused though...
Spoiler warning ends here

Casting the film aside now and focusing on the pieces of reality that got declassified by the USA government, and that unfortunately can only allow us to barely scratch the surface of what was going on during those years of "human behavior investigation and manipulation"....

In 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKULTRA files destroyed. Pursuant to this order, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MKULTRA impossible. A cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms' purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial record building and were discovered following a FOIA request in 1977.

MKUltra was both fascinating and terrifying. Given the minimum knowledge about the human brain that was held at that time, that some high ranks of the military thought that it would be possible to develop techniques for fully reading and manipulating the humand mind sounds like rather arrogant.

One of the most astonishing facts is that the investigations crossed the USA borders to the North, funding the atrocities conducted by the crazy psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron in Montreal. There are some pages in that mandatory reading (if you happen to want to understand a bit how our current world works) called The Shock Doctrine where the barbaric experiments conducted by this beast are explained. He aimed to reprogram humans by completely wiping out their memories, a process he called depatterning. The means used to achieve this werer this were sleep deprivation, massive doses of electroshock and different cocktails of drugs... Unfortunately he was rather successful with his experiments, meaning that he managed to destroy the lives of a good number of unwitting patients that had turned to him seeking out help for common problems like anxiety or mild depression.

There's a very good documentary dealing with all the MKUltra madness, Mind Control, America´s Secret War