The trailer for The Philosophers seems like another of those films where a social experiment goes wrong and ends up with the people involved becoming far too involved, however there's an interesting take to this trailer where we see the situations being played out as though we were looking into the imaginations of the characters.

Also don't get me wrong, the films I'm thinking about such as The Experiment (Das Experiment) and The Wave (Die Welle) are excellent films that recreate well known social experiments in a modern setting and work really well, judging from the trailer The Philosophers looks set to join them.

The Philosophers is written and directed by John Huddles and leads with James D'Arcy who is teaching a group of students and for his final lesson before graduation he conceives an experiment that begins as a debate regarding philosophy, morality, etc. but soon digs into their psyche and becomes much more.

The experiment pitches the twenty students against each other in an imaginary world where they stand outside a nuclear shelter equipped to take ten of them safely for a year to survive the nuclear holocaust and allow them to restart the human race. Each of them is given a random profession or history and each must debate their worthiness to enter the shelter and at the end of the debate everyone votes for the ten to enter the shelter.

It's hard to see how this will build the tension and become out of control when it's just a debate, but then the trailer suggests it's more than that as they appear in actual locations. Is there something more to it than I'm seeing here?

Here's The Philosophers trailer through Deadline: