11:30 a.m., “The Killing Room,” at the Prospector: This one is part of the midnight-movie series because it’s a dark, gruesome thriller with graphic violence. It’s also a head-trip, a claustrophobic story about a deadly game with a strong, committed cast.
Chloe Sevigny plays a woman who, because of her meteoric rise as a military psychologist (and reader of body language), has been recruited by Peter Stormare, who is running a secret government program, supposedly proscribed by Congress and the president decades earlier.
Essentially, he gathers four people in a room (in this case, Nick Cannon, Timothy Hutton, Clea Duvall and Shea Wigham) and, one by one, kills them. After the first death, they’re told that they are being winnowed – and the “experiment” is to choose who will be the perfect candidate for Stormare’s twisted ends.
For a 90-minute movie set in a single room (well, two, actually), this one rarely feels padded. You have to have a stomach for hysteria and intensity, to be sure – but the pay-off is an outstanding surprise.