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?

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