Film · 2001 · Films · 2000s
The Experiment
Scored from 118 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
A German psychological thriller in which 20 men are recruited for a paid two-week study simulating a prison, randomly assigned roles as guards or prisoners. As the guards enforce escalating rules and the prisoners resist, the experiment spirals out of control with violence, humiliation, and breakdowns of authority. Inspired by the Stanford prison experiment.
Released in 2001, The Experiment is a drama and thriller film.
7,846 other films from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 118 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 123 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Experiment lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2000s (7,847 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 118.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
