It is hard to recommend this. It feels like a film school exercise which has been stretched far beyond its natural capacity to engage or entertain. The premise is this: eight young high-flyers are at the last stage of a selection process for a well-paid position in some mysterious corporation. The final test is to sit an eighty-minute exam in a sealed room with an armed guard. The stern invigilator carefully spells out the rules which apply; he exits the room and the candidates turn over their papers to find……. a blank sheet. This is like The Apprentice, with knobs on, set in Hitler’s bunker.

To be fair, having set himself a near impossible task writer-director Stuart Hazeldine does pretty well to keep us engaged, if somewhat incredulous, for the allotted span (we proceed more or less in real time). He finds enough for the characters to say and do and there are decent dollops of physics, medicine and psychology along the way, and a hell of a lot of group dynamics. And rest assured: by the end we do know who gets the job. But to call them characters is being generous, because the eight candidates (chosen to give an even distribution of gender and racial types) never rise above the level of ciphers, and the unfolding plot is increasingly preposterous. Given such intractable material, the actors bravely out-thesp each other in an attempt to bring it to life, but they never become rounded people. And given that we are forever stuck in an unforgiving basement, the film is hardly generous with visual delights.

It is good to have a debut director prepared to make a film about ideas rather than launch into a more traditional genre (there are far too many bio-pics at the moment, for instance), but in this case ideas take precedence over character and plot, and that is surely a mistake.