By Staci Layne Wilson
@StaciWilson

It makes sense that Experimenter is an experimental film; not unlike Lars Von Trier’s Dogma or Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, writer-director Michael Almereyda drops in stylized painted backdrops and elements of fantasy in an otherwise straight-forwardly told, often formal-feeling story. The tale is related directly by the controversial social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), who takes us on a journey from the inception of his 1961 study, the “Milgram Experiment on Obedience to Authority Figures,” to and beyond his death in 1984.

The Yale study, you may recall, involved volunteers who were instructed to administer excruciating electric-shocks via remote control to an unseen subject strapped to a chair whenever the subject answered a question incorrectly. They were dubbed “Teacher” and “Learner.” The whole thing was a trick: the volunteers were actually the ones being tested.  Milgram found that 65% of the “teachers” were willing to zap the “learner” (a lab worker pretending to scream in pain from behind the door) with shocks that would’ve been fatal, simply because they were following politely-given instructions.

The film is often slow and strange, but Sarsgaard paints a nuanced portrait of a little-known personality in Dr. Milgram. There’s exploration from all angles of the experiment (and others to follow), including an overview of Milgram’s personal life – Winona Ryder plays his wife, Sasha, who believed so much in her husband’s research that she was willing to put it before their marriage and his fatherhood.  Other cast members include John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning and Anthony Edwards.

We see how Milgram watched his experiments from behind a two-way mirror – an audience to the spectacle, just like us. The movie is interestingly made in its visual and narrative sense, but that doesn’t mean it always holds one’s interest. I found that it dragged from time to time and sagged in the middle, yet I enjoyed it overall. If you liked the biopics Kinsey (2004) and A Dangerous Method (2011) then you’re the target audience for Experimenter.

1 Hour, 47 Minutes

Get times and tickets at Fandango.com.

EXPERIMENTER Review — Famous Yale Study Dramatized