Peter Sarsgaard is wonderful as Stanley Milgram, but the attractively stylized film is less about the postulating professor and more about empathy and duty.Jason Robinette
Lately we've seen flashback fascination with the study of human behaviour, what with Showtime's clinical orgasm series Masters of Sex and this year's feature The Stanford Prison Experiment, a haunting revisit to the psychology of power and abuse.
More retro lab-coating and turtleneck-sweater conjecture comes from Experimenter, a stage-play-like biopic of Stanley Milgram, the American academic who in 1961 invented a controversial experiment in which people were duped into believing they were delivering electrical pain to an affable stranger in another room.
The test was about obedience; the electric zaps weren't real, but the study's realization – that we tend to strictly (if hesitantly) follow orders, even to the detriment of others – was shocking indeed.
Peter Sarsgaard is wonderful as the postulating professor, but the fresh, attractively stylized film is less about Milgram and more about empathy, duty and post-Holocaust elephants in rooms.
Michael Almereyda's movie is relevant, coming after recent films Good Kill and Eye in the Sky on soldier psychology and war by remote control. The experiment, then, continues.
Brad Wheeler