IN AUGUST 1971 Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo gathered 24 middle-class, evidently well-balanced male students for a paid research project requiring up to two weeks' residence in a homemade jail. The Stanford Prison Experiment group was randomly divided into guards and inmates, then left to their own devices (with a few guidelines) in a simulated cell block. Things quickly got out of control. Petty rebellions roused surprisingly overzealous disciplinary reactions from the "guards," while the "prisoners" soon showed signs of extreme stress, hysteria, and depression. The research team began acting more like real prison administrators than responsible, disinterested academic observers, and the experiment was halted – ironically, just one day before an infamous blowup at San Quentin, three weeks before the Attica riots.

Oliver Hirschbiegel's new German feature Das Experiment (based on Mario Giordano's novel Black Box) recycles that factual saga in fictive thriller terms. There's no reference to the Stanford experiment, yet in most respects it hews so closely to actual events that you might wonder whether the term "plagiarism" applies. Cab driver protagonist Tarek (Moritz Bleibtreu from Run Lola Run) enters the study because he hopes to relaunch his lapsed journalism career – just as in 1971 a student activist planned on selling an article to underground newspapers and was responsible for inciting conflict in hopes of a better story. The inmates here are dressed in flip-flops and dresslike smocks with nothing underneath, just like their South Bay models. And things spiral out of control much as they did 21 years ago. This being a movie, however, they naturally get a lot bloodier by the final reels than nonfiction allowed.

Bereft as it may be of original ideas, Das Experiment still has terrific potential. The notion of voluntary role-playing drawing out the capabilities we have for dominance, sadism, psychosis, and all else normally kept under "civilized" society's firm control is a rich one. Are fascist impulses sleeping in every id? (Hirschbiegel claims he "never thought" Nazi inference might be read into his casting a perfect Aryan blond as the most insidiously power-crazed "guard" until others pointed it out. Uh-huh.) How easily can free will and group solidarity be broken?

These are questions much less simple and more disturbing than the usual good-versus-evil movie setups. Unfortunately, Das Experiment can't resist pulling away from those deeper resonances and going for typical popcorn thrills. First-time big-screen director Hirschbiegel's TV training shows in the headlong pace and incidents-per-minute compression. There's no space to convey the slow decay of reason, the oppression of a privacy-, sleep-, and natural light-deprived environ, beyond leaping toward their end results. In 1981 the late British TV auteur Alan Clarke directed Psy-Warriors, a portrait of controlled psychological conditioning/brainwashing whose methodical starkness was much more chilling than anything Das Experiment offers.

Nonetheless, its novelty of conceit has earned Das Experiment a clutch of awards, big German box-office success, and Hollywood offers for Hirschbiegel. To the film's credit, its last reels (as characters run around the institution inflicting grievous bodily harm) do work in straight-up thriller terms, and the charismatic Bleibtreu makes an excellent hero. But the Stanford prison model still awaits serious cinematic treatment. I knew there was something wrong with this one when by the end I found myself thinking, "A remake would be perfect for Jean-Claude Van Damme!"